[dmbaggett]

In the same era (age 7-12) I went to school on an airbase in Germany and at some point “they” (no idea who) decided I should not do normal math, but should instead spend time with the Airmen who ran the computers. They had an Interdata-something-16 minicomputer which had both punched tape and teletype I/O. I played Oregon Trail on the teletype and always died of dysintery. I once asked the wise and aged Airman (he was probably 25), “can I punch my own holes in the tape and make the computer do cool things?” To which he responded “Yes. No.”

[kjs3]

Around the same age, I went to a 'gifted student program' as well, and they had a Teletype connected to the school systems mainframe (pretty sure a Univac 1100, but it was a long, long time ago) by an 110 baud, rotary dial modem. The nice thing, was this particular model of Teletype had a paper tape punch as well as a reader, so we could sorta 'save our work'. We had a Star Trek game (very popular) and wrote some (very rudimentary) Fortran programs that once in a blue moon compiled and ran (the teachers didn't know much more than we did, and the documentation was minimal). It was still pretty amazing.

Fun fact...the Interdata 8/32 ended up being pretty significant to Unix history down the line.

"Yes. No.". I had that conversation with adults when I was that age a couple of times. :-)