On 22 Feb 2014, at 22:41, "Steve Cottrell" <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 22/2/14, Bob W-PDML, discombobulated, unleashed: > >> When I got my first programming job, in 1982, it was at a site which ran >> an old ICL mainframe. We had a paper-roll teletype, and submitted jobs >> on paper-tape, including our source code, which was either COBOL or the >> ICL assembler, called PLAN, which we wrote in pencil on coding sheets. >> >> These were punched to tape by a roomful of data prep clerks, all women, >> many of whom could read the tape very easily. The other 2 programmers >> and I had to learn to read it well enough to be able to find the >> segments we had to cut out where there were compilation errors. >> >> We also had to punch the corrections by hand with a spike on a kind of >> clamp thing, then sellotape that segment back into place on the rest of >> the tape. >> >> You had to be very careful with your coding and your cutting and >> splicing because we only got one day a week on the computer, Tuesday >> evenings after 5pm, when we stayed till about midnight. >> >> For short tapes used for job control (not JCL, which was an IBM thing) >> when you'd got the tape right you could copy it to a strip of expensive >> blue tape, which was reinforced and could stand to be run over and over, >> whereas the ordinary tape would break after a few runs. It was very >> impressive to watch a program you'd written processing the tape, and >> once you'd run it a few times you could tell by the rhythm which part of >> the program was executing. > > Clearly you didn't do this for kicks.
That was the time I discovered my inner nerd. I'd never even seen a computer until 3 months before starting that job, when I was forced onto a govt-sponsored training course. Until then I had intended to waste my life sitting at terrace bars in Saint-Germain des Prés talking bollocks in French to dark-haired girls in berets. Unfortunately I couldn't persuade anyone to pay me to do that, so I had to get a job instead, and to my considerable surprise I turned out to be quite good at it. Which is probably a good thing for the world, otherwise I might have had to write a book and win the Prix Goncourt or something. B -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
