<p>Never programmed with cards. Did load the registers a lot with 8086. Scarred for life from that experience.</p>
<p>Z80 was older.</p>
<p>I’m too young for the punch cards, but I do remember learning to program in LOGO and BASIC in elementary school. We had a Commodore VIC 20 computer with a tape deck that hooked up to the TV, next to the Pong console.</p>
<p>Being key punch operator used to be a separate profession - like being a typist in the typing pool. There used to be for-profit “business schools” that advertised on the radio about how in a few short months they could train you for a “rewarding career” in the business world as a key punch operator. Companies that made a lot of use of computers used to have large rooms full of mostly women who spent the entire day manually making computer punch cards.</p>
<p>I remember writing BASIC programs as a 6th grader on a very early computer.
It spat out reams of ticker tape stuff, as I recall.</p>
<p>Hanna, my husband’s roommate made a computer with a tape deck and TV my junior year in college. I also remember him coming back from a summer at Bell Labs raving about this thing called a mouse!</p>
<p>My high school had the ticker tape and basic that hooked up with a mainframe at some local university. I believe people learned BASIC. My first experience was in college learning the world’s stupidest programming language PPL. I wrote my first resume on a PDP11 at my then boyfriend’s lab. One of his labmates procrastinated by designing fonts with serifs for the computer. I gave him artistic advice!</p>
<p>Meanwhile my oldest was programming on a PC with Visual Basic at age 6 or 7!</p>
<p>I remember punch cards in college. I also remember that when I collected data for my senior thesis, I paid some graduate student to manually enter all the data (copied from tables in books) in the computer for me, and I had no idea how he actually did it, and then I ran regression analyses to prove / disprove my thesis, which took a long time to do. These days, those data streams would be available on the Internet and I could probably throw it all into Excel and do what I did in a matter of minutes, if not seconds.</p>
<p>I also remember taking a class (in business school) on business communication and presentation skills, and they showed us this fancy new way of hooking a powerpoint presentation to a computer and clicking to advance it, and all the students (mostly twentysomething young professionals) looked at it in horror and said, no, we prefer to bring transparencies of our presentations to clients, that’s safer - what if the computer breaks?</p>
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<p>I remember being at a conference a few years ago where a fairly old professor was giving a presentation. He made a big deal about getting out an overhead and told everyone how he preferred the old technology because it’s more reliable. About five minutes into the presentation, the light bulb dies. He goes, “But this is why they put two bulbs in!” About thirty seconds more into his presentation the second bulb dies. He just stands up there, dejected, and goes, “I guess I’ll start doing presentations on a computer in the future. :(”</p>
<p>Well, I gave a talk at a conference last year and my laptop did break and refused to send data to the projector. I ended up borrowing someone elses laptop. </p>
<p>About Pascal–I know Niklaus Wirth, Pascal’s designer quite well and used to be able to impress and entertain my students with inside stories. Now they say who? What’s Pascal?</p>
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<p>Pascal is still used at the IOI (programming version of the IMO)! Though I think it’s mostly used by eastern European contestants.</p>
<p>I never learnedPascal, but used Basic (Quick Basic) in DOS PC while doing phd thesis work in early 80s. I tried to do C programming in Macintosh, but soon gave up. While converting the Basic programs to C++, soon after the Java language came out in mid 90s… I did a lot of work for about ten years in Java because it was so easy to do graphics and animations. C++ was nearly impossible to do graphics, at least to me, in the amount of time I had. But unless a stand alone application or applet is required, a math package like Matlab is the best tool. Most STEM majors require using at least one math tool among Matlab, Mathematica and Maple. Maybe I am going off tangent here … only read a few posts</p>
<p>^Most STEM majors in the 80s were required to learn FORTRAN. Most of the advanced graphics in the 80s and the early 90s were done on Unix workstations with C programming. I had fun working with X-Window hardware and software. I also had fun to work with Forth language on the PC for products that supported graphics and multi-tasking, a concept that Microsoft did not have at that time.</p>
<p>Anyone remember VT 52 and VT 100 terminals?</p>
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<p>Wow, brings back memories. BASIC was a great programming language. I spent a lot of time making pictures and simple animations with it (though we used an Apple as I think I’m a little younger than you.) LOGO was kind of boring to me as I learned it after BASIC.</p>
<p>I had some good time using BASIC on the VAX/VMS machine to compute trajectories of stars and spaceships in my math application class. But on the PCs, the only thing I remember about BASIC was using some program provided by Microsoft to compute mortage interests.</p>
<p>^I also used and wrote fortran programs in vax/vms in my final year of working on phd thesis. But the ibm pc soon filled my needs, so i used basic in DOS, then in macintosh and mac plus before switching back to windows (i forgot the name of the first version of windows). i taught classes in the 80s requiring simulations in vax/vms, and soon switched to unix. what i meant about STEM requirements, it meant it now, not back in the 80s. I think matlab and mathematica can replace most of stem computational needs unless your goal is to develop a stand alone application or the size is too large that a structured (object oriented) development is necessary.</p>
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I used the paper tape–I think I still have some around here. In college, I took a programming course for non-majors in which we learned “APL.” I think that language was already forgotten by the time I graduated.</p>
<p>Since we’re doing techno-nostaligia:</p>
<p>I still have my old Kaypro II. Fire it up now and then. Still works fine.</p>
<p>That’s pretty old. I thought I was hot stuff when the first computer I bought had a 20 MB hard drive instead of two floppy drives. It was a Hyundai, with an amber monitor.</p>
<p>No wonder this thread is still alive. You all are math/science people, sort of.</p>
<p>I think we converge.</p>