First encounter: Ohio Challenger 2P (and its 4KB of RAM)

Personal computing, 1980-style. (credit: Old Computer Museum)

Update: It's Labor Day in the US, which means Ars staff are more likely to be monitoring a grill than breaking news throughout the day. As such, we're resurfacing a few classic stories from the archives, such as this from our old "First Encounter" series, which revisited those moments in which we first came across some new bit of tech that would eventually change our lives. This story originally ran on December 22, 2012, and it appears unchanged below.

I had seen glimpses of it as I walked past on my way to AP Geometry, but now I was about to enter the school computer lab for the first time.

It was September 1980 and my freshman year at Gateway High School had been knocked off-kilter barely a week into the first term. I had signed up for Russian 1, which involved a daily bus ride to the nearby high school in Aurora, Colorado where it was offered. My excitement at learning the language of the enemy during the height of the Cold War dropped considerably when only four students-from across the entire school district-showed up the first day of class. Such low enrollment meant Russian was cancelled a few short days later, forcing me to rework my schedule. I substituted Latin for Russian-which eliminated the need to hop on a bus each day- and that in turn opened a spot on my schedule for Introduction to Computer Programming.

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