On 13 Nov 2008 at 10:57, Ian King wrote:
My first language was FORTRAN, on punched cards; the
teacher of my
high school programming class would send the decks to the school
district's main office, where they'd be run on the S/360. We'd get
our printouts three business days later. You learned to be careful
about punctuation and spelling, with a three-day turnaround!
Even in the corporate environment, you often only got a max of 2 or 3
runs per day.
But always being the daredevil, I soon eschewed the
coding forms and
would compose at the keypunch (an IBM 129). It drove my teacher nuts -
especially because my programs usually worked.
The height of luxury was composing your programs at the operator's
console of a CDC 6600, using the o26 PP utility and
assembling/compiling using DIS. Yet, I knew several programmers who
worked just this way, myself included. Sometimes, the keypunch was
just too far away...
If you needed cards, you could always copy the file to the punch
queue. For whatever dedicated block time went for back then
($500/hour?) it was better than lighting cigars with $20 bills.
It was years later that I learned the coding forms
were usually the
programmer's only tool, and unskilled keypunch operators would
actually create the decks. So I was really coding on the edge! --
I learned very early on to develop a very chummy relationship with
the ladies of the keypunch pool. It made all the difference in the
end product, my chickenscratches notwithstanding.
List the result on a 407, hand-check against your original coding
forms. It was surprising how many logic errors you could turn up in
this process.
Cheers,
Chuck