Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium. They put ttys and later silent 700s in elementary schools and libraries connected by dialup to a CDC. they had a early mud called Milieu that I spent a lot of time on...and I wrote some basic and pascal programs. in fact I think I took a programming class at some kind of summer school at the community college that was hosted there too.
MERITSS/MECC was a fun, funky time-share system. It used multiple peripherals to feed one central CPU (with not much memory). The access I used had an acoustic modem (using a dedicated line) and a Model-33 teleprinter with a ASCII paper tape reader/puncher for storage.
On good days, the time-share part was transparent. But there were dozens of access points; on rare days when most of them were in use, you could press a key and wait 10 or more seconds to get the character echoed back to the printer.
One day I got one hour of access to a plasma-screen PLATO, and it was amazing. Never again even saw another.
btw, in "The Big Bucks" I have a (fictional) grad student Matt Feingold at U Minn. I've never even been to Minneapolis, but I did at least verify that there was married student housing, and they were not in the initial group for CSNet.
Matt sneak-installs ARCNet at the university, which I'm pretty sure never happened. There's also a fictional French professor "Dr. Caron" who talks about the (real) Minitel.
The Minitel actually was pretty decent, and they had a revenue model vastly different from what we've ended up with (the cost just ends up on your phone bill, and the service providers pay the phone company). I'm not saying this would be better, but at least no ads!
thinking about this now. its pretty clear to me that that early education in computing gave me this career. as a youth I never wanted to pursue it, but when it was computing or minimum wage for the 8th year in a row - I already had the tools I needed to start.
