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but because he bent a few rules to gain better access to a terminal through school.

iirc, gates went to a pretty well-off private school that actually HAD computers. i doubt that most people attending public schools in the 60's could even find a computer anywhere nearby. this is documented in Gladwell's Outliers (ducks!)

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Yeah, that definitely helps. I wasn't rocking a computer at home until 15 and I'm incredibly thankful I was able to get that when I did. My public schools in the middle of KS wasn't doing anything with computers when I was 8 and I didn't know anyone who talked about them.

Trying to take this point back to the 60s is stretching it beyond usefulness, though; in the 60s even having privilege would hardly have been a guarantee of access to computers. It depended on many other things, too.

Note that I do not accuse the original author of trying to stretch this, nor you; just pointing out that if we're going back that far it becomes a completely different issue. (We can wish really hard that every child of the 1960s had access to computers for learning, but we might as well wish that every child of the 1860s had such access for all the practicality that has.)

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