How It Was in the Beginning of Computing
I had some prior experience before entering my coding bootcamp at the University of Connecticut.
IBM programmer’s pad, early 1970s. It was 80 columns wide, matching the columns on a punchcard. Each line was meant for an individual punchcard. Below, some punchcards from Smithsonian magazine.
I had some prior experience before entering my coding bootcamp at the University of Connecticut.
But my experience was decades ago. It began around 1970 while I was a student at Long Lots Junior High School in Westport, Connecticut.
An article on Medium.com describes a similar experience to mine.
The First Program I Ever Wrote.
https://medium.com/code-like-a-girl/the-first-program-i-ever-wrote-5a5a6b08469c#.kwr27uc07
The writer is Debra Lobel, who describes herself as “author, fan of legacy and modern technology, and dedicated family caregiver.” She also describes herself as a software developer for four decades.
So … Yep, she’s right in my age bracket.
She starts off referring to the same IBM programmer’s pad that I used. You can see a photo at the top of this article.
My friend, Kevin, let me use pads he received from his father, who was a software consultant. That pads contained 80 columns for 80 characters on a line — the same number of characters on a line of a computer punchcard.
I used a lot of those punchcards later at Duke.
In junior high, Kevin and I, along with our friends, spent hours working on these pads. They were designed for FORTRAN coding, but we used them to code in BASIC. We could’ve written out BASIC on lined paper, but it was way more cool — and probably more disciplined — to write out the code, character by character, one block at a time.
We typed our code into the mainframe at the Westport Town School office using a Westinghouse acoustic coupler teletype terminal at Long Lots that looked like the machine below. We dialed up the computer, which was housed in a big room at the high school. Probably no room at Staples was secure as the room where the IBM mainframe was installed.