Getting Started, circa 1983

17 Mar 2014

Like most folks who started programming in the 70's and 80's, I began on mainframes. It was years before I programmed a desktop computer.

And while I strive to avoid damn-kids-get-off-my-lawn graybeard ramblings, I'll sometimes get this question from a brash young whippersnapper trying to understand what pre-PC era programming was like:

Back in your first programming job, what kind of computer was on your desk?

In my first programming job, I didn't have a computer on my desk.

My desk - like those of my co-workers - was device free. The nearest we had to a personal computing device was an LCD calculator.

Not only didn't I have a computer on my desk, there wasn't one in the entire office, or even in the same building. We were programming a mainframe that was about five miles along the road.

Instead, imagine a stack of these on my desk:

COBOL Coding sheet

This is an IBM coding sheet, for COBOL. We had them for other languages, too: Pascal, Assembly language, Fortran.

You'd use these to hand-write your computer programs. In pencil.

Because this was the dizzying heights of "undo" technology:

pencil eraser

And when you were finished handwriting a section of code - perhaps a full program, perhaps a subroutine - you'd gather these sheets together (carefully numbered in sequence, of course) and send them along to the folks in the data entry department.

They'd type it in.



If you'd made even a simple typo - say, a missing period, or something that looked more like a colon than a semicolon - it'd take at least another 24 hours to get a fix in and turn it around.

This method, as you might imagine, requires a somewhat higher level of attentiveness to writing code than the way most of us work now.

I wouldn't want to work like this again, but I'm glad I have worked like this.

And though it may seem primitive now, several of the programmers I worked with at the time viewed that state of affairs as programmer-friendly, if indeed not simplistic.

They'd been used to working with punch cards, something I only ever did a handful of times.

I'll admit that even at the time (early 80's) this was a little - though not much - behind the times. I was working for the British Government, not some new-fangled highly-funded tech company. You use what you can get.

A year or two into this, we were finally upgraded. Amidst much rejoicing, we were provided a handful of IBM 3270 dumb terminals - monochrome devices, with the classic IBM Model M clicky keyboard.

Imagine the sensation - type your own code in? Compile a program yourself? How marvelous! What an age we lived in!