Dear jjw,

I'm glad you found it amusing. BASIC was also my first language. I learned back in 1975 or 1976. Our HS had a pdp-8 (marketed as an Edusystem 25) minicomputer. It operated on actual core memory and we interfaced to it via a control panel of switches, and two teletypes (110 Baud).

The teletypes had tape-punch/readers. There was no disk space. We loaded the OS by punching in a bootstrap loader and putting in the OS tape (paper tape). It took maybe 30 to 45 minutes to boot up.