That's how it all started

by Volker Weber

This gives you an idea of how old a fart I am. That was before we got a VAX. And then Arpanet which became Internet. Just a few years later, IBM made a PC and started building them in Boca.

Comments

Phew. We have indeed come a long way.

Hubert Stettner, 2016-05-03

Happy me - first class at University of Vienna (1983) who did not use punch-cards anymore. But they were still in use for some years.

Bernd Schuster, 2016-05-03

Been there, done that. :-)

When I started working with computers I punched up my Fortran programs on cards and assembler programs for a process control/monitoring system on paper tape.

The paper tape was used to program this very computer (http://gallery.nen.gov.uk/asset655203_13863-.html) at Wylfa Power Station in Wales. We've moved on a bit since those days!

John Keys, 2016-05-03

The HCC (Hobby Computer Club) in Utrecht, the Netherlands did a course in UCSD Pascal by Rob Bronckers of the Physics department. He initially sparked the interest with Pascal on the Apple II, but that needed an Apple Ii and a card and was expensive. The course was given at the University of Utrecht (not officially), and we were told we could use the physics department account since they got all the leftover time on the CDC Cyber mainframe anyway. Started out using punchcards, submitting the pascal programs as batch jobs. Later on used beehive terminal, still submitting batch jobs. That meant after completing a program submitting it for execution and waiting for output to show up after being spewed out of huge line printers. The printed a line at the time, very fast.

After a while the sysadmins, who were never appraised on the Pascal tutoring scheme, caught on and locked the accounts. One of my friends logged on, saw his code replaced by a warning memo and quickly left, narrowly escaping a Security Guard entering through the other door of the terminal room...

Lars Berntrop-Bos, 2016-05-04

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