A strange little side quest
Before the next round of Diary Maggie: Making Pancake, here is a piece of the bigger picture. By the 1890s, department stores and mail-order catalogs were selling mass-produced ready-to-wear clothes in standardized styles and price ranges. The same trail leads to another fact: Spacewar! appeared on MIT's PDP-1 in 1962 and became one of the earliest influential computer games shared among programmers. The details change, but the appeal of learning a system and trying again is remarkably persistent.
