I built my first company on engineers I hired from the local college by simply asking them to send me students who had clear talent but weren't engaging well in the academic side. We became a local clearing house where we quickly found out whether they could thrive outside of the academic environment. Two of them became "The Best" you talk about. One in DevOps (earns way more than me now) another found his talent in DevEx.
Working in Post Office Research in the 1990's I watched a couple of PDP-11's being hoicked into a skip near our labs. Sadly I lived in a shared house with no room for them....
At some point around '92 or '93 I was offered a Xerox lisp machine by the university I worked at - living in a small flat at the time I don't think I would have been popular if I had taken that home.
Apologies for opening a tangeant on a tangeant, but am I the only one who thinks there are 2 levels of playing master mind (and therefore wordle)? Easy level, you let the player know exactly which spots are correctly placed and which ones are there but incorrectly placed. Hard level, you let the player know only that some are correctly placed and some are there but incorrectly placed without identifiying which ones.
I personnaly don't enjoy the easy level when playing mastermind, but I do enjoy the hard version which is much more investigative and in my opinion triggers the same brain process as when I'm debugging code.
