Jaunty: Notifications

[GreyGeek]

Lindsay Mathieson wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Apr 2009 07:34:48 pm marc wrote:
>   
>> Ah, the Four Yorkshiremen approach.
>>     
>
>
> Heh! When I were a lad we wove our own punched cards from flax in the snow 
> uphill on the way to coal mine and were grateful for the opportunity!
>
> nb. I actually learnt to code using punched cards. We had to mail them to the 
> nearest data processing center in Invercargill (New Zealand). Turn around for 
> bugs was three days :)
>   
Ah, punch cards.   My first training in data processing was at the
Barnes School of Business in the fall of 1959 and the spring of 1960.  
"Programming" was using banana cords to wire plug boards on 10 year old
IBM 402 accounting machines.   We punched the cards with the IBM 504
(540?) card punch, and sorted them with an IBM collator, the number of
which I've forgotten.    I was 18 at the time but looked 14, so I could
never convince prospective employers to hire me.

In the fall of 1962 I had a chance to go to college, something I really
didn't plan on in HS, and worked 20-30 per week, working my way
through.   While in grad school, during the 1967 school year, I took a
Numerical Analysis course as part of my Physics course work.  We used
Fortran 4 (1964) as the language and punched the solutions to quadratic
equations (and three other functions) into rolls of yellow paper tape
using the KSR 133 keyboard.  They were sent to a processing center and
the results were returned a week or two later, printed on green bar
paper.  We got either the printout of our program and the solution to
the problem, or a listing of the program up to the point where an error
occurred.  If we got errors we had to retype the yellow paper tape again
and resubmit it for processing.  Some finished only one of the four
problems before the end of class.   Half way through the class a /Friden
EC-130 /electron calculator was purchased, which was absolutely amazing,
at the time.   I finished grad school using it for every problem I could.

Ten years later, in the summer of 1978,  I purchased the first Apple][+
sold in the state of Nebraska.  By the end of  year I was teaching night
classes in Apple BASIC programming to high school teachers for college
credit through the Univ  of Neb at Kearney.   In 1980 I started my own
computer consulting business which I retired in 1996 when my last client
gave me an offer that my wife wouldn't let me refuse. :-)   Eleven years
later, when I was 67, I retired.
GG