[fjsva]

I've tried to explain to my son and nephews how I programmed in FORTRAN 77 on punch cards in college.

My son wanted to know how you could tell if the games worked when you didn't have a monitor...

[festus]

Thats a good one. When we got the pet in elementary school they had this swell multiplication game.

The rockets fired across the screen and you'd have to type in the product before it hit the side. Miss to many and you blew up. Get enough right and you got to see a really cool ascii-art space ship fly across the screen. The extended ascii of the PET was very good at this ;-)

I never did learn my multiplication tables that well. Instead I read the source code, figured out where I had to start the program to skip the quiz and go straight to the winning picture.

To this day I'm still convinced thats the right choice. I can get paid more to program than do multiplication tables ;-)