Re: I spit on your socialist paradise...
Eh..no, not exactly.
What it meant was that those with a serious interesting in programming got all the time we needed and those who were just arsing around got a terminal to play with. Of those half dozen people who were serious about learning and got all the time on the good tty all but one of us ended up in high tech. The last guy ended up in computational chemistry.
The following year i got access to the computer facilities of a major research institute so the last 18 month or so at secondary school I made little use of the PDP 8. I was basically just tech support. The guy who rebooted the machine and made fresh copies of the tape. The Apple II I had unlimited access to in the research institute was about 20 times faster than the DEC. At least you did not have to manually bootstrap Woz's integer BASIC. It was in ROM.
My minicomputer career was basically over by early 1978. Better toys to play with. Never did do mainframes and punch cards. Which I believe was a whole new dimension in pain and frustration.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
