Still have the keys to a 3081 operator’s console, and a couple of boxes of blank punch cards…
As I was 4 years old in 1972, my father, working as programmer for a bank (at that time 64 KB filled a whole room), teached me to read punch cards
Wow!
I worked a lot on the 370’s and newer, mainly with COBOL and COBOL/CICS, and also Software AG Natural/Adabas.
Good old green dumb terminals! ( I can still hear its unique metal key stroke sound)
At home, I was everything but a geek until I came to know Linux, which is now my only OS. With the knowledge I got from tweaking it at home, I ended up making a shift in my career, from mainframe programming to IT. And with that, I rediscovered Windows, via Windows Server, an excellent tool to put a tight control on workstations and quickly deploy changes to their configuration.
I learned how to program at school, with pen and paper. But we couldn’t actually run programs at school because schools didn’t have computers in those days. To run programs I had to cycle three miles to the local college of further education. They didn’t have a computer either, but they did have Teletypes, mostly to prepare programs on paper-tape but one Teletype had a modem for connection to the local Polytechnic which - wow - actually had a computer.
Hahaha.
If we’re talking intro to computer science, for me that was in 2nd grade writing in LOGO then BASIC on Apple][+’s at school. We actually learned by crayon and paper first. I remember it well. TO SQUARE…
https://archive.org/details/edd_Apple_Logo_1982_Logo_Computer_Systems_v1.5
At the time, to work on IBM mainframes writing DOS/JCL procedures and FORTRAN programs did not seem so dreadful
To put everything in perspective, I recently made a short programming stint in a company, and discovered that someone there was writing Cobol to read XML files. Add a jar of Prozac to the array of programming tools…
I must add that, thanks to my interest in Linux, I slowly adopted it at work since around 2010. At first it was as dual boot along Windows. But now, since 3 years ago, I made Linux my main OS at work. I had to wait this long because 90% of my co-workers work on Windows, 8% on Mac, and the rest on Linux. As a researcher, I have to work on shared documents, in general from Word, Excel or PowerPoint, now I can do it more easily since LibreOffice made great progress with regards to MS Office compatibility.
Holy schmokes Batman, Red Hat Linux going to IBM for $34,000,000,000.00.
Big Blue Hat Linux anyone?
You said it, @HIRAM, that’s a lot of mullah!
I wonder how many Red Hat customers feel about the Big Blue Behemoth swalling the red fedora.
Especially given BigBlue’s track record with its acquisitions (Lotus, Rational…).
The one in my engineering school (late 70’s) covered a whole wall. The professor that taught us how to use it was convinced that the future would be hybrid analog/digital computers.
I heard that in the 60s, somewhere at Aerospatiale, there was a big building housing such a computer that was a simulator of the structure of Concorde.
You see way back in my day, we made all our beats on a Buchla system 100 in one of the university laboratories. It’s sequencer was formerly installed in Ken Kesey’s van.
I love the unique sound. That is what I go to YouTube, etc., for.
Nowadays they use computers analogas simulated with GPUs
Never to be outdone… My first computer, a sixties-era Ordinatron600 I got for XMas, with its classy wooden box. I still have it… one of these days I’ll fire it up…
My first actual computer was a SInclair ZX Spectrum.