You guys had it tough, we were allowed to use partially straightened
paper clips to punch the Fortran programs.
OTOH You guys had it easy with access to a machine. Once punched, our
cards were put in the post, and send 200km to the nearest university,
where they sat in the absolute lowest priority queue, and eventually
they ran the deck and mailed it back to our school with the lineflow
output - the longest turnaround was over 6 weeks. Unsurprisingly desk
checking and code reviews were the first professional skills we taught
ourselves. Despite these hardships I still fell in love with the
adventure of pitting my mind against the machine and bending it to my will.
Bruce
On 3/10/2011 9:54 p.m., Russel Winder wrote:
On Mon, 2011-10-03 at 10:42 +0200, Matthew Farwell wrote:
Fortran? COBOL? You were lucky! When I started programming, I had to
punch cards using me own tongue, and if you missed an ole, your father
used to beat you until you were dead, to get a slot on machine, we
used to have to get up half an hour before we went to bed, etc. etc.
<yorkshire-men-sketch-accent>
Luxury.
</yorkshire-men-sketch-accent>
And yes we were using punch cards, but with a proper machine rather than
the manual ones.
Another skill that has been lost is editing large rolls of paper tape --
far harder than editing punch card decks.
BTW Fortran is a not-bad language, unlike FORTRAN.
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