[II2II]

I just turned it on while doing housework and paused to listen more carefully to the interesting bits. Sometimes it's nice to listen to a person's own words on their own terms, rather than having those words filtered through the lens of someone else's perspectives.

Granted, this one is a bit special to me. I attended the same university as Gosling (decades later) so I could visualize the places and experiences he was talking about, while digging through old memories of my own. It's strange to think that a PDP that I saw in a trash heap may have been the machine he programmed on, and a prof that was teaching PDP assembly in the late-1990's may have been someone he learnt from.

[non-entity]

> It's strange to think that a PDP that I saw in a trash heap may have been the machine he programmed on

I certainly hope you don't mean a literal trash heap.

[II2II]

This was over 20 years ago, and the machine itself would have been about 20 years old at that point. At that time, it would have been the norm to dispose of such a machine in such a manner. It was certainly too big to grab for the collection of vintage personal computers I had at the time![1] (To be more specific, it was a disorderly pile of pieces on a dock where equipment was frequently left to be disposed of.)

Of course, I can't be certain it was the machine Gosling used. I don't know how many PDP's the university had. My recollections are also sufficiently vague that I don't remember the exact model, just that it was a PDP composed of many boards. Anyway, the bit about Gosling possibly using it was just a fancy I had while listening to the interview.

[1] Calling those personal computers vintage seems weird now. None of those computers would have been older than 15 years at that point in time, but a 1982 computer would have less in common with a 1997 computer than a 2005 computer with a 2020 one.