>>>"Good God, man, have I ever told you about the time I used to program an IBM
>>>370 mainframe using punch cards?"
>>Some of us started life toggling a paper tape loader in the front panel of a
>>PDP-8...
>
>I'm feeling positively baby-ish here -- I started by typing a program to compute the Fibonacci series into a time-sharing system with no monitor, just a teletype. :-)
>
>Right after that, I switched to the TRS-80 Model I (before there was a Model II -- built-in 8.5" disk drives? Now _there's_ an advanced machine for you...)

Geez, by that time, I'd already built myself a S-100 bus based system (Godbout) and had worked on PDP-8s, PDP-12s and a Xerox Sigma 9. You have no idea how much fun you missed! I'll bet you never even had to wire-wrap anything...