[JohnFen]

I'm old, too. I learned to program on punched cards, and remember the move to high-speed paper tape. That was awesome!

One of my favorite stories is from those punched card days. I was a careless teen, and knocked one of the developer's card decks off of a desk, sending all the cards scattered widely across the floor.

The sysadmin made me gather them up and manually sort the several thousand cards into the proper order. It took a over a day. When I was done, he took them from me and dropped them into the hopper of a machine in the corner to "check my accuracy".

What he didn't say, and I didn't know until weeks later, was that the machine he used was a card sorter and could have put the entire deck into the correct order automatically. The dev made me sort the cards manually as punishment -- and it worked, as I was much more cautious from then on.