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Burn_IT · Joined: 12 Aug 2006 Posts: 3702 Location: Tamworth UK

I started in IT in 1966 - not that IT existed as such then.
Punch cards were the storage media most used, which led to favourite tales of Floor Sorts and Leicester Shuffles.

Packetteer · Joined: 12 May 2012 Posts: 73 Location: Long Island Ny

Hi All
A friend of mine Joke was that he stated that he never numbered his
punch cards. This way if they ended up on the floor he could put them back
in any order

Best Regards
John

rockedge · Posted: Fri 27 Mar 2020, 13:01 Post subject:

my very first computer program was line by line on punch cards...written in FORTRAN and ran on an IBM mainframe in 1974 at AVCO Lycoming, a gas turbine engine manufacturer. My dad was an engineer working on the AGT 1500 engine that eventually ended up in the Abrams M1A1 main battle tank.

He arranged that I could drop off the pack of cards in the correct order to the high priests (sysop's) who would at some point take my program from the queue and run it. Next day my dad brought home a printout of the results.

I was 13 years old and the program did not do much..more of a "Hello World" but it ran. Only the sysop's had direct access...the computer room was climate controlled high security area...no one could even look at it except those guys.

I later went to school to be a mainframe sysop and batch script programmer...but it was already the dawn of the new age and LAN's and the desktop computer workstation was on the horizon.