On 4/15/2010 4:09 PM, John Grossbohlin wrote:

wrote in message
news:71c6c$4bc74b5f$d1ac0dbb$5518@allthenewsgroups .com...
yeah. It's not often anymore I get to explain something to my 28 year old
making-a-ton-of-$-programming son.

Anybody here under 60?


(born in the first half of the last century)

How about the last half of the last century?

Guess I was an early adopter as I started playing with IBM 360 main
frames in the early 70s as a kid. This via an Boy Scout Explorer Post
that was sponsored by IBM... Playing is probably the correct term as
Fortran and APL things we did were pretty basic. I recall playing a tank
vs aircraft game on an APL terminal... piles of paper spewed out of what
was pretty much an IBM Selectric typewriter! As I recall it was via a
300 baud acoustic coupler modem.

Ahh, the old 2741 Interactive Terminal. Saw one of those eat a Big Mac
once--fragments of all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese,
pickles, and onions flying all over the place (the sesame seed bun was
still in the guy's hands). Ran for two weeks after that, before it
needed a service call. Poor IBM tech almost lost his lunch. Still got
my APL element for it.

A guy I knew wrote a Star Trek game in APL. Of course that was when
Star Trek was a dead TV series and nobody was trying to enforce the
trademark.