[adoyle]

My math teacher in the 8th grade in 1971 made up a virtual machine with an assembly-like instruction set. He had us write programs and then 'execute' them by thinking about them as though we were the VM. Once we got the hang of that, we learned Fortran and got to send punched card jobs to a computer on the other side of town. Turnaround time was measured in days. It's been a wild ride since then.