Sumer was my first exposure to computers. I used my mom’s account at the university to access the VAX over a DECwriter 100 dot matrix teletype terminal.
At 6 years old, I got quite good at the game. Left alone, to my own devices wandering the halls of the universities engineering buildings, I played Sumer and wandered in and out of labs and lectures, and occasionally offices.
I soon used up all of my moms computer time in the first week of each month, but by then I had learned to access user reports and other administrative logs, and found unused employee accounts from places like the physical plant and grounds maintenance. I would log into these perpetually unused accounts and use up their cpu time so I had basically unlimited access to the VAX by the time I was seven.
I learned how to use mail and a little Fortran. Sometimes I could use the tekscope video terminal to play other games, and I discovered a Star Trek based space war variant, which I started modifying to make it more fun to my seven year old sensibilities. I’m not sure that was appreciated by the others that probably played the game from that file, but it never really crossed my mind. I’m sure that someone was puzzled by all of the janitors and groundskeepers that contributed to their codebase lol.
At 6 years old, I got quite good at the game. Left alone, to my own devices wandering the halls of the universities engineering buildings, I played Sumer and wandered in and out of labs and lectures, and occasionally offices.
I soon used up all of my moms computer time in the first week of each month, but by then I had learned to access user reports and other administrative logs, and found unused employee accounts from places like the physical plant and grounds maintenance. I would log into these perpetually unused accounts and use up their cpu time so I had basically unlimited access to the VAX by the time I was seven.
I learned how to use mail and a little Fortran. Sometimes I could use the tekscope video terminal to play other games, and I discovered a Star Trek based space war variant, which I started modifying to make it more fun to my seven year old sensibilities. I’m not sure that was appreciated by the others that probably played the game from that file, but it never really crossed my mind. I’m sure that someone was puzzled by all of the janitors and groundskeepers that contributed to their codebase lol.