| I wrote my first computer program on an 8" floppy. I had signed up for a course in BASIC at my high school, in 1981. The school had a computer facility with access to a mainframe operated by the county school district. We had these machines made by IBM, that emulated a keypunch machine, but stored the data on an 8" floppy. They had the same keyboard layout as a keypunch, and a one-line alphanumeric display. The idea was that a skilled keypunch operator could start using floppies with no retraining. You entered your program and handed the disk to the operator, and received your printout later. You could do one or two debug cycles during a class period, maybe three if you came in later during the day, after which the operator's patience wore out and you were told to write your program more carefully. In reality, they were probably doing this work as a favor for the math teacher who was teaching the class. The next semester, the school got some CRT terminals, but there were five terminals for a class of about 15 kids, hand picked by the math teacher. I still remember my user name and password. I wrote a program that generated mazes, and when I thought it was working OK, I set it to print out a maze the size of a sheet of green bar paper. Next day, I got a big scolding for creating an endless loop. But in reality, my program was OK and I learned a lesson about complexity -- my program probably had some insanely high order like O(n^3) or even worse. I don't know of anybody remembers or noticed, but I remember taking some of my first plane flights, and the person behind the ticket desk was typing very quickly on their terminal, but with just their index fingers. That's keypunch technique. |