Something brought to mind Joshua Lederberg's description of his early computing efforts at Stanford, and the way that the computer center became a meeting-ground for all kinds of people:

In those days, we had a B220- which would match a fairly feeble PC today- as the first campus machine. Its operating system would accept decks of punched cards in serial batch mode, with output either from the printer or new punched cards. The usual turn- around time was about 12 hours. If you got to the computer room around midnight, you might get another pass by 2 A.M. The democracy and night-owl ambience of the batch system was a social mixer for several enthusiasts from wide-ranging disciplines. (I particularly recall Tony Hearn, who was starting his symbolic algebra system, REDUCE, on the IBM 7090). The impedance of a one-pass per day turnaround certainly did filter out all but the most enthusiastic.

I suspect there's a whole social history of the early campus computer center as intellectual crossroads waiting to be written. From the bits and pieces I've picked up over the years, it sounds like computer centers were like printer's shops in the 16th century (as described by Elizabeth Eisenstein in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change): spaces that attracted and mixed together all sorts of people, who shared an interest in a new technology and– thanks to their desire to be close to the machine– discovered that they had many other mutual interests as well.

He also had this little "kids today have no values" throwaway line, which I've heard from other old school programmers (like my father-in-law):

You also spent a lot of energy trying to simulate the machine in your own thought, in contrast to the casual, experimental mode- "Let's see if this works"- of today's interactive systems.