Technology is a rather marvelous thing!
(In some ways, to be sure!)
Earlier today I watched a long strip of backing paper from some self-adhesive labels slowly slide onto the floor and had a sudden memory of my first exposure to computers, at least in the first-hand sense.
This would have been when I was at boarding school in the UK, likely in 1976 and I discovered that the school actually had a "computer hut." I likely would not even have found out about this, were it not for a rather nerdy kid I befriended in my weekly nature conservation group for "public works."
And that's where I learned to program a bit in BASIC, in an overly simplistic sort of way. It was a surprisingly tedious process that started out by us hand writing the intended program (bit of code) on notebook paper.
Once we were reasonably sure we had it right, we'd sit down at a data entry terminal that actually created the "code" on 8-bit paper tape... which tells you a bit about how old I actually am!
Once we had our roll of punched tape, it would go to the tape reader that would actually send it to the computer for compilation and execution. This is, if you were lucky, and the tape didn't jam in the reader or break in the process...
Of course, the school computer wasn't exactly new at the time — computers cost tens of thousands of dollars and could (at the time) do less than your average old flip phone — but I remember thinking it was pretty amazing technology, as a 15-year old. As I recall, it was some kind of IBM minicomputer...
Of course, I didn't get to work with it very much because I was not a math or science student. But it was still cool, and we felt very "important" much like people who had worked on the Apollo space missions.
I didn't encounter computers again till I arrived in Texas for University, over four years later. Whereas we were still in "old times" from a computing perspective, UT Austin had a much bigger budget, and a computation center with multiple mainframes for student use, including both IBM and VAX mainframes that lived underground in a bunker-like structure under one of the buildings.
At that time it was no longer paper tape that held the code, but large heavy stacks of punched cards — locally known simply as "IBM cards" — which always filled us with the fear of dropping a tray (containing 1000's of lines of code) on the way down the stairs to get get them read... and then having to spend hours putting them back in the right order!
To anyone under the age of 30, this probably sounds like complete science fiction!
However, it was a way of life until we finally "graduated" to a system that allowed us to work "interactively" and was a little more like the command line interfaces of today.
And no, even though I did work as a teaching assistant and grader in the Computer Science department for a while, I did not end up pursuing a career as a developer. However, I'm glad I did learn the basics of structured programming and how software "works."
Somewhere in my old boxes of "stuff" there are a handful of ancient things nobody today would recognize... like a piece of black cardboard that was a very important device you'd stick in the slot of large floppy drive if you had to move your computer... to prevent the read heads from "crashing" and becoming damaged as a result of the machine being shaken while moved.
Technology really does canter along at a remarkable pace!
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your week!
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Created at 2025.01.22 16:48 PST
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