NEWARK, N.J., Oct. 9 -- New Jersey Institute of Technology issued the following news release:
The first computers Gary Lauterbach encountered were not in a classroom.
As a teenager in Livingston, New Jersey, he spent Wednesday evenings at Bell Laboratories in Whippany with a Boy Scout Explorer post. The Bell Labs employee supervising the group was unusually permissive. Lauterbach and his friends were allowed to wander through the building, poke their heads into laboratories and use some of the computing equipment.
One machine, a PDP-8 minicomputer, particularly interested him. Lauterbach wanted to understand what was happening underneath the commands - how machine language, memory and data paths somehow combined to make the thing work. S...