I Remember When ...

[Gronbog]

... there were no 1's only zeroes.

That's an old joke, and there are lots of them in the hardware/software development community. Another thread veered off topic into what's considered old and "newer" and how far back some of us go. I thought it might be fun to see how long some of us have been at it.

Without giving up too much information about yourself, how did you get started with software and what was the world like at that time? Norm got us started.

(https://www.blackjacktheforum.com/sh...l=1#post166592

Let's continue in this thread.

[Marvin]

Well, I've never had to deal with punch cards...

First programming experience was tinkering with Basic on an Apple II.
Wham! (The duo, not the BJ21 poster) topped the Billboard charts that year.

Years later, in college, I had programming classes in Pascal, C, C++, and eventually VB. The campus was pretty high-tech for the time with each dorm room wired with Ethernet and each student able to connect to the mainframes via DEC Pathworks.
WWW was just getting started. First browser used was Lynx on a VMS box.

[Gronbog]

I thought was was an old-timer until I read Norm's post.

I stumbled into the software world while pursuing a Math degree in 1981. I was taking math because I hod no idea what I wanted to do with my life but I wanted to go to university. I figured that I might as well get good grades while doing that and math was what I was good at. Part of the first year math program required two credits in introductory programming (COBOL and FORTRAN). When I realized I was good at it and that they were paying good money for programmers, the light went on. I switched my major to computer science (still within the Math faculty) and the rest is history.

At the time, the main computer at the university filled an entire room (an IBM 370 mainframe, probably running some MVS variant) and it was a batch system. I missed punch cards by one year, but the system we used was a rough electronic equivalent of the punch card system. You submitted your program for compilation and it went into a queue. You would check about 30 minutes later to see if there were any compilation errors. If none, you could then submit for execution which took about the same amount of time. They also had some Vax systems running a version of Unix, but only the elite 3rd and 4th year students were allowed access.

My first co-op job (internship) was operating a similarly sized mainframe for IBM (VM/CMS and MVS), also am IBM 370, which essentially meant that I was sorting printouts and changing tapes. Very few had personal computers and, if they did, they were mostly using them to play games. The first IBM PC was about to be announced and we had a prototype on which we mainly played games between changing tapes. When I got bored of that I taught myself BASIC between changing tapes. The computer I was tending was used by a marketing department and I ended up writing a shopping mall demo of the IBM PC in BASIC which allowed folks to select IBM commercials for playback via an external Pioneer Laserdisk system. I made the mistake of having demo ask people their names and then referring to them by name during the demo. I learned later that some not-so-nice things were typed in by people who then would leave the demo which would then refer to the next user as something not-so-nice.

Other languages I learned around that time: Pascal, APL, SNOBOL, 8088 assembler, lisp, prolog, PL1 (and later PL8 and PL9), C and the various Unix scripting and shell languages. I didn't learn C++ until years later.

Other systems I gained experience with at that time: PDP/11, IBM System/36 and System/38, Commodore PET and Commodore 64, Apple Macintosh.

[Three]

I was recruited out of high school for a gifted student program in a big company's environmental impact department. They had 2 computer's, a giant IBM that used punchcards and took up an entire floor in the building except for a tiny corner of the floor. There sat a shiny new HP that was state of the art. I spent some time doing some menial tasks like making punchcards doing hand calculations on handheld computer's and putting together the environmental impact studies in hard copy (publishing). Some of the top minds in the world were working there. After their long time assistant scientists told everyone how fast I caught onto things that took them 6 months or more to get this changed. I would explain stuff to them that they took many months of teaching for these assistant scientists to grasp. I got to do some pretty cool stuff after that. No more menial tasks. Then I went off to college and got a different summer job. It was an interesting 2 summers though. Getting to see real genius in action and deal with people far smarter than I am is a rare and precious thing. I learned a lot and treasure the experience. Gronbog covered the languages etc but I don't remember running into any apple products. I probably did but I have no specific memory of it. I do believe Macs didn't come out until about a decade later.

[ZenMaster_Flash]

Tthree,

"I don't remember running into any apple products.
I probably did but I have no specific memory of it.
I do believe Macs didn't come out until about a decade later."

The Mac was born in Jan. 1985 supplanting the Apple II desktop computer.

[Norm]

Back in the late 70s when I was working for Rutgers, I bought a room full of Apple IIs for a CS course. The next year, I went out to bid for something more sophisticated. We bought $300,000 worth personal computers of a brand that is just a memory. The largest PC-type purchase made by an educational institution at the time. DEC threatened to sue me because they had entered a device they were making with a lower bid. But, there was no NJ law saying that we had to accept the lowest bid. I thought it was pretty cheeky of them considering that we already had a PDP-10 and then a DECSYSTEM20, and I later bought a VAX-11 mostly because I really liked the architecture.

[Frank Galvin]

PDP/11 and VAX System, at state university in Lowell, MA. They started their C.S. program in 1980 after receipt of several hardware grants bestowed on the university and the State, by Wong, Digital Equipment Corp., Hewlett-Packard, Raytheon and IBM. The math department ran the C.S. program. I started out as undeclared liberal arts student with no clue where his life would lead, nor what career path to follow. But that all changed when I was recruited by the chair of the math department for his fledgling program, based upon my math course grades in high school, and scores on the SATs.

Servers took up whole floor (1/2 floor each) of a huge building, with AC running continuously above the drop-ceiling, and below the false floor. Our terminals were green screen 10"-12" monitors, and were pretty useless. We had to hard code batch punch cards with our programming. The programming languages offered at the time were Basic, COBOL, Fortran, and Assembly Language.

After a few weeks, I developed a twitch in my left eye from watching those green screens. I realized toward the end of my first semester that my health was worth a heck of a lot more than continuing with the eye strain, twitching and headaches I was experiencing from using those green screen monitors. So, I dropped out of college at the end of my first semester, and that was the end of my computer programming journey (til now). Returned to college, and decided that I wanted to become a lawyer. Go figure!