That Sigma 9 photo brings back fond memories. An earlier version, the Sigma 5, was my first personal computer! Back in 1968.

I was hired as "night operator" for a timesharing company in Phoenix called Transdata. Their service ran on a Sigma 5, but they didn't offer the service at night.

So my graveyard shift gave me full access to the Sigma 5 to do whatever I wanted. I learned BASIC, assembly language, and Algol 60. And the art of writing an entire useful program on a single punch card.

One single-card program we used a lot was a simple print program. You'd put the program card at the front of the deck, and it would load and then print out the contents of all the cards after it.

Only problem was it was a bit slow. It had a single buffer that it read a card into, then printed the contents, then read the next card and so on.

I looked at it and realized I could squeeze in just enough code to make it double-buffered. It could read the next card at the same time it was printing the previous one. Twice as fast!

Not much by today's standards (unless you're into code golfing), but it was a lot of fun at the time.

That story really makes me wonder if my understanding of computers would be deeper, or more complete in some way, if I'd had that sort of background/experience...

Take a course on compilers. It will teach you these things and give you a much more fundamental understanding.

Seconded! Also play with assembly language for a small CPU, even in an emulator. Doing assembly in the 68k and Z80 really helped me grok computers. Even the old assembly makes super CPUs of today more understandable.

For anyone reading this comment, living in the general Seattle area who hasn't visited the Living Computer Museum, I highly recommend it.

I took my son and father there, and it was a great time.

For my dad and I, it was great to revisit computing through our lifetimes, (for me) starting with the working Amiga 1000, learning basic on the fly to help my son write "Hello World" (he's 2), then playing Oregon Trail on an Apple IIe, and having 1/2 my family drown attempting to ford the river.

Same, my daughter was 1.5. The people there were really nice, playing with her while I was geeking out. Sometimes my daughter would come and sit on my lap to watch what I was doing. It's really a special place and a very fond memory.

I didn't realize this was his work. I've visited that museum and it truly is amazing. You can play with working NeXT boxes, a working Alto (the screen resolution for that time is amazing to see in person), TI9As, tons of old HP-UX machines ... If you're ever in Seattle it is totally worth checking out .. that and the smaller (though less interactive) museum at Recycle PC.

It's by far my favorite museum. I always go every time I go to Seattle and there is always a new machine to play with.

You learn many things of how computers evolved by using them. Like seeing your terminal session printed and how the display is actually some sort of never-ending paper. Also making your own punch cards or hearing the noise of mainframes cooling systems.

Damn, it hurts to see Paul Allen go. Hope they keep the museum intact.

I was hoping people would mention the Living Computers museum, I had a chance to visit on a short trip to Seattle a couple of weeks ago and in the space of about 45 minutes I played a game of chess with a PDP-8 entering moves on a working teletype, wrote some BASIC on an original working Apple I and Altair, played a maze game on a Xerox Alto and played around with the fascinating UI on a NeXTstation. Capped it off with a game of Oregon Trail on a Mac SE.

I'm so grateful that people like Paul invested in giving people the means to interact with such iconic machines and kept them running - the value of places like this is immense.

They have a working Xerox Alto with the original suite of Smalltalk programs as described in Personal Dynamic Media (Kay and Goldberg 1977)!

I had just been reading about the history of Xerox Parc when I went to the museum, and being able to then use that machine was the most magical experience I've had in a museum.

Thanks Paul and everyone else who makes the Living Computers Museum live.

It's a great museum. I gotta say even as a 80's programmer kid, those old computers are extremely hard to get to do anything. It had tens of old working computers I had never seen before, many from decades before I was born still running. Pretty incredible.

I was just there last weekend, and they have the ONLY apple 1 in the world that is hooked up to a monitor + keyboard that you can actually interact with (or so they claim it is) - it was very cool nonetheless.

Seconded. Paul loved IMSAIs, and the Living Computer Museum is a national treasure. Check out their work around Maze War

This place is wonderful - for someone like me who works with languages like C, but is quite young it was very valuable to be able to see how programming with older machines worked - and seeing the progression of things like Vi/Vim etc.

The Living Computer Museum is probably one of my top three favorite museums I've been to. I remember playing with dot-matrix printer teletype terminal connected to a PDP. That was really a trip.

I had no idea this existed! I love that I can get a login to a real PDP/11!