65 years young (1 Viewer)

I have been a programmer since the early 1970's which is most probably long before most of you were born. In those days we wrote programs in pencil on coding sheets and punch card girls would create 'punch cards' from the coding sheets which would be fed into a card reader attached to the mainframe and stored on disk. You then ran a job on the mainframe computer that compiled your program into executable machine code.
Debugging was done by pouring over pages of Assembler code trying to see what caused the program to fall over. If the program was part of a 'mission critical' program suite such as stock control we used to get called up in the middle of the night and had to drive into work immediately to fix it. You couldn't leave until it was fixed which sometimes meant working long into the day shift from being called out at 1am that morning.
In the late 70's I moved from IBM mainframes to mini computers and bought my first home computer an Apple 2. It had 1x 360k floppy drive and a 10 inch black and white monitor and in all cost me £1200. When the chips got hot they start rising out of their chip sockets and you had to push them back in.

Welcome to the forum youngster, it pays to be careful in assuming that all on here are still wet behind the ears, many are in their 60s.

At 71 I am not the oldest, bladerunner is at least 72.

I too started on punch cards in 1962.

Brian

1962 wow. That must have been a tabulator with patch panel circuit board. When was the IBM 360 series first released ?

Yeah 4 very large and heavy main circuit boards, plugging them was hard on the fingers, they were DeLa Rue Bull machines.

We moved to an IBM 360/50 with a massive 512k of memory in 68 I think, or maybe that's when we started our education with the machine arriving later, it's all bit hazy now. It was great fun at the time despite the out of hours working which built a bond in the DP dept, I can't remember when Data Processing morphed into Information Technology my job didn't appear to change.

Brian

I started as a data control clerk and when we got an IBM 360/25 I became an operator for a couple of years. The company then retrained me as a Cobol programmer. Did a bit of RPG along the way and a new language which IBM meant to replace Cobol called PL/1 but it never really took off. It wouldn't surprise me if some institutions like Banks and Insurance companies are still running some of those old systems.