Re-printed from an old Straight Dope message board. Ha!

The first computer class I took in college was on punch cards. This wasn’t before the earth’s crust cooled, it was only 1979. Anyway, it’s probably why it took me so long to sit down at a computer again; I had nightmares about those @#$&*^~! cards.

Oh yeah? The first programming I learned, we saved our programs on spools of paper tape. We didn’t even have a CRT, just a Teletype machine. (This would have been in 1975 or ‘76). We eventually got a 9 1/2 inch floppy drive and a CRT, and were some happenin’ dudes. I’ve still got some of the spools, and the enormous floppy disk.

You had a Teletype machine? We would have KILLED for a Teletype machine! Once I had to write an entire operating system using nothing but a wall full of toggle switches! Keyboards… HA! You had it easy!

You all had electricity? All we had was a bunch of gears that had to be roatated by hand… Took years just to get the thing to add 1 + 1.

You had gears??? All we had was rocks and sticks. Rock = 0 and stick = 1. You’d get a line of code all written and then a dog would come and carry off your 1’s and you’d have to start all over. You guys had it easy.

You had rocks and sticks? Jeez, try growing up in the desert… Grains of sand made the coding damn near impossible!