On Mon, Aug 16, 2004 at 05:29:58PM -0400, Ed Centanni wrote:
> Dated?! You want dated?
>
> I remember doing Fortran on punch cards.
>
I can't beat that. In high school, I was the only kid in the school
allowed to go into the teachers' lounge and hook up the teletype to a
300 baud acoustic modem, and from thence to the school district's
mainframe. I learned mainframe BASIC and punched programs onto paper
tape to be able to run them later. Played lots of Star Trek, too. Other
kids started noticing me going into the teachers' lounge, crowds started
gathering, and they wouldn't let me use the computer any more.
When I got to college, I heard from a friend that what passed for
computer use was Fortran on punch cards submitted to the drones at the
university's comp center. You got a printout with your errors and the
cards back, and you had to do it all again. After being "interactive" on
a teletype, I figured this scheme was too much trouble. So I never took
a computer course there.
A real shame, too. If I'd taken a couple of courses, maybe I could
actually operate this dang computer thingie. ;-}
Paul
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