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dwebarts

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You've got about a decade on me but I actually had a prof that had us use a paper tape lab for Basic. You didn't have the issue of disordered cards if you dropped them and hadn't numbered them, but a damaged paper tape roll could mean having to redo the whole thing from scratch. Making sure it didn't get wet in a Chicago winter could be challenging.
 
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I was in college from 69 to 73 and learned Fortran and Cobol in programing classes. Had to type programs on cards by punching holes in them and submit them into an IBM computer. It was fun, but never used after college. Things advanced so quickly with computers that I went into another field. Today I am retired but I wish I had stayed in computers.
young 'un! I graduated engineering school in '68 and in that time, I learned how to design with vacuum tubes, transistors and flip-flop ICs in those 4 years.

Ever learn programming by having to put a jumper wire from memory 1 to the A register and another from Memory 2 to the B register then jumper them to the + function then jumper the output to the C register then jumper that to memory 3 to add two numbers together? Then you went on to step 2! By the time you finished a 10 line program, the board was just full of jumpers so you plugged it in to the "computer" and when you got the wrong answer, you had to trace all those jumpers to figure out which one you had put in the wrong place. Summer after Junior year of HS on an Engineering summer training sponsored by a National Science Foundation grant to the college. We all got a slide rule as a parting gift. I still have mine although I never used it after that summer even during 4 years of undergraduate EE and then years later in grad school. By then, the HP45 came out (I still have that too!).
 
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My first job as a kid was at a roller skating rink and 2 of the regulars were husband and wife programmer analysts for AA. They relocated to Tulsa for the transition to IBM 360s , and Sabre was their main occupation. I believe it grew to around 16 3090 mainframes, I'm sure today it is a giant linked server farm....
 

jis

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I was in college from 69 to 73 and learned Fortran and Cobol in programing classes. Had to type programs on cards by punching holes in them and submit them into an IBM computer. It was fun, but never used after college. Things advanced so quickly with computers that I went into another field. Today I am retired but I wish I had stayed in computers.
One of the generation that had an intimate run into IBM 029 key punches. 😊
 
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When I was in JHS I was supposed to have an extra advanced math class, but the teacher got sick right when school was starting so they filled the hole in my schedule with a typing class. I can't begin to tell you how many of us (mostly guys) were sitting there saying when will typing ever be useful to us. Roll ahead to HS and I took computer science, and having some typing skills sure helped with the keypunch.
 

denmarks

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I was in college from 69 to 73 and learned Fortran and Cobol in programing classes. Had to type programs on cards by punching holes in them and submit them into an IBM computer. It was fun, but never used after college. Things advanced so quickly with computers that I went into another field. Today I am retired but I wish I had stayed in computers.
I started programming around 69 too. It was great when we finally got terminals to enter our programs and run them with no cards involved.
 
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One of the generation that had an intimate run into IBM 029 key punches. 😊
Back in the day when you typed up your program and submitted it in the morning, went off to classes and came back at lunchtime for your output and got a one-line printout "job card error". Arrrgh! Back to square one, Go stand in line for the keypunch. You got to know where all the obscure keypunches scattered around the campus were where you didn't have to wait.
 

west point

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Got to love those punch cards. First thing is learning sorting and locating a certain card. Start with sorting the last number or letter and work backwards.
Then like posted programming the cards for a burrows 220 later a 5000. Enough of the details to give one giant headache!
 
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Back in the day when you typed up your program and submitted it in the morning, went off to classes and came back at lunchtime for your output and got a one-line printout "job card error". Arrrgh! Back to square one, Go stand in line for the keypunch. You got to know where all the obscure keypunches scattered around the campus were where you didn't have to wait.
My mother tells the story that, when she worked at the Standard Oil Co. in the accounting department, someone running the gas-station monthly billing before going home forgot to put spacers between the cards for each bill and came in to work to find all the bills printed on the first page. :oops: My mother got to work early and ended up helping to reload the cards double-quick so the bills could be run before their boss arrived.
 
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