I too was using the NBS TIP. Later, I actually worked at NBS and became "legal". I first learned Emacs at 300 baud; I'll spare you the whole story, but it involves a lot of assembly language and some soldering...
Do you remember Rob Griffiths, aka ROBG? I really enjoyed his full interview from Get Lamp -- he really nailed what it was like at that time, making a pilgrimage to 545 Tech Square as a 15-year-old kid!
https://archive.org/details/getlamp-rgriffiths
He and you are a couple of the people who I was thinking of when I described kids from all over the country hanging out chatting and spying and waiting to play Zork!
I also did a pilgrimage to MIT and saw the DEC-10s. Printed out a school project on the LGP, played around with a Lisp Machine for a few hours.
MIT's friendly, unparanoid attitude towards people using their systems and basically just digging their technology was very formative in my career. Zork was the hook. I came to play adventure games, I stayed to learn Emacs and a bit about networking and PDP-10s, and LISP. I don't use PDP-10s anymore, but I work in the games industry, use Emacs every hour of my working day, and wish I could write more production LISP (though if you squint at Javascript just right...)