[tyleregeto]

I've stumbled across this before, its a very good read. Highly recommended! There are some great videos on YouTube about the subject, left over from that era. I really like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaVwzYN6BP4 (produced in 1969)

Its interesting how little programming has changed since these days. The way we program has changed significantly, put what we produce is almost identical. Each punch card represents a single instruction, equivalent to a line of code in our modern text editors.

I wrote a small punch card toy in JavaScript not too long ago to get a feel for what programming with punch cards may have been like. That's here if your curious: http://tyleregeto.com/article/punch-card-emulator

[mtdewcmu]

Programming in the punch card-era sounded better. When it was time to compile your program, you got to take a walk, and you met girls.

[walshemj]

mm but the waiting in line wasn't fun - back in the 80's we had a dial up link to a mainframe to run CFD models,

I recall one day in our terminal room one of the engineers came in logged on - then commented with a sigh 48 jobs in the queue ahead of hers.

[mtdewcmu]

You were using punch cards in the 80s? I thought they'd given way to magnetic storage by then.

[walshemj]

Not at out end we used to get data back from some of our partners (Admiralty Research Establishment at Portland from memory) in paper tape form - I had a few paper cuts from our high-speed paper tape reader.