Comment by jleyank | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jleyank | Hacker News Reader

Well, the PDP-8E was introduced in 1970 and by 1971 it was probably present in a significant portion of us high schools. This, coupled with commercial time-sharing service access started training the second generation of hackers who are responsible for spreading the MIT spirit and inventing all sorts of things done with computers. This has created a staggering amount of wealth since then, which might be reflected in the wall of charts cited in this article. Probably more wealth in a single segment than the looting of precious metals and gems due to colonization.

Edit: games, process control, the follow-on PDP—11 which redid the phone system, and enabled Unix to explode. The need to follow DEC which brought forth the minicomputer business, …

Go ahead, explain 44B being spent for Twitter to somebody from 1971.

>, the PDP-8E was introduced in 1970 and by 1971 it was probably present in a significant portion of us high schools.

Was there a special program to support a roll-out of this era's PDP-8 boxes to U.S. high schools? Or some other reason how/why this is? (I recall access to a PDP-8I in high school circa the same time).

It was not staggeringly expensive. Google says 6-7k and I vaguely recall a trustee ponying up 15k so that the (private) school had a computer. Time sharing services were probably a manageable expense.

While not cheap it’s way less than “real” computers and tended to be open for the hackers not the staff.

>by 1971 it was probably present in a significant portion of us high schools.

That would surprise me. In 1979, right in Silicon Valley, the biggest high school district (East Side Union) had one computer in the entire district, housed at the largest school (Independence). It was a PDP 11/04 (IIRC).

Any schools that wanted to offer a BASIC programming class had to rely on Mark Sense cards submitted through daily intra-district courier runs.

"the PDP-8E was introduced in 1970 and by 1971 it was probably present in a significant portion of us high schools."

Universities perhaps, high schools no.

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