Yeah, got into software thanks to roblox. Way easier to get started than most of the suggestions in this thread and caters from everything from building maps to writing code (if you want to do that). Lua is pretty easy to pick up but you can use TypeScript or Luau if you want.
You also don't need Lua knowledge.
The games can run on desktop, mobile, and even console. Built-in multiplayer. Huge community. Lots of tutorials. It's pretty amazing, to be honest.
Funny because right now my son is busy building a "Doors" clone in Roblox Studio. I don't think it will have any logic but he loves just building the map so far. He's 7.
East High School is the closest public high school to the University of Utah. Because of this proximity the school was fortunate to get a direct T1 (1.5 Mbps) connection in 1992 (93?).
The original domain was east.east-slc.edu before it was standardized to east.k12.ut.us circa 1995.
After school every day for a few hours the East High CS room would be full of students exploring the new online world: surfing gopher, playing MUDs, Usenet, and using NCSA Mozilla on the DEC station. This is when Yahoo! was all hand curated.
Students could even dial in to one of 2 modems and connect to the Internet from home. It was glorious.
The thing is, nobody in the US cares about the network any more; it's been good enough for twenty years. I don't even know how fast mine is. It was very different then. People had modems that pushed 9.6kbps, 14.4kbps, 28.8kbps, 33.6kbps, then 56kbps. Each upgrade was substantial because it was the limiting factor -- I remember each one, as you can see -- and obviously way slower than that mythical T1.
I can personally attest to this, until I moved out to the city, I was significantly kneecapped in terms of what speeds I could have and it had an impact given how many services just implicitly assume you have high bandwidth and more or less lock you out if you don't. And I was one of the "lucky" ones in the sense that I was on a well known national cable provider, heaven forbid you were on telecom DSL or (for the really poor sods out there) V.92 or ISDN.
Skyline High School had a teletype terminal by 1978. I think it connected to the University of Utah, though I am not absolutely certain. But that was a long way below a T1 line...
I recall in the late 70s that my high school also had a teletype terminal and an IBM card reader that connected to a mainframe for the whole school district. As a student I had some awareness that it was unusual. I was also working PT at a Radio Shack at the same time and saw the first arrival of a TRS-80 to our store.
Despite that early exposure to computing technology I went other directions for the next couple decades.
Right out of high school I started as an intern at PTC in Research Park shortly after they acquired CDRS from E&S.
CDRS was originally started by some of the researchers from the University of Utah that created the Alpha_1 NURBS modeler.
After PTCs org wide rebranding, it was called Pro/Concept.
I worked on the other product in the group called Pro/3D Paint. It was the first product to use projective texture mapping to allow industrial designers to draw directly on 3D models instead of in texture space.
So many more memories I wouldn’t know where to begin…
I started using ISDX in ‘96 soon after PTC acquired it and managed to port it and make it work with Pro/E. I’ve worked on a number of products which are still in production using it, but it’s been a while since I was using Pro/E (now Creo). I don’t miss Creo, but I do miss ISDX. There was a while when I was using Solidworks and Pro/E (with ISDX) depending on the project/client, but then I transitioned to Solidworks for many years. Now I’m using Onshape (started by the key people from Solidworks) which recently was acquired by PTC. Both Solidworks and Onshape use the Parasolid kernel which was first developed for Unigraphics. It seems like it’s a small world in CAD tool development.
I mentioned in another thread I used alpha_1 in high school at the U (2002). I had actually had Autocad (R16) 3D CAD experience at the time, but alpha_1 was a lot of fun. I ended up making a 3D Model of Escher’s Belvedere. One of the guys was going to “print” it down in the lab in the bottom of MEB (they did have some form of 3D printer) but thought it might be hard and unstable. I ended up getting it rendered with ray tracing on one of the brand new UltraSPARCs they had in the lab, and it was printed on a T shirt that everyone got. We also got a copy of VisualStudio 6 from Microsoft (we toured their studio near the airport) which I sold on ebay for $375 at the time.
I don’t know the exact year the CDRS group was acquired by PTC, but it be around the same time I attended the same High School Computing Institute in 1996.
Jim Blinn and Ed Catmull will both be speaking next week (March 24th) at the 50 year celebration of the University of Utah Computer Science Department.
I doubt the veracity of your claims because according to multiple sources [1][2] the only nuclear reactor in the state of Utah is located on the bottom floor of the Merrill Engineering Building on the University of Utah campus.
If a reactor were located on the BYU campus, I would expect it to be public knowledge and tracked by the IAEA.
I used to work on the top floor of MEB for many years and had the opportunity to see the glow of the core in the pool of water on multiple occasions.
Tangentially, the UofU reactor made national headlines last week when a student made a threat to blow it up if the football team lost [3].
Most of the infrastructure is likely still there as well. Most DOE facilities are also junkyards with the metals moratoriums so I could imagine this applies to BYU.
I went to BYU and while there are tunnels under campus, they're basically just for maintenance, steam and electrical conduits, etc. as far as I'm aware.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Ruffin_Tyler