• HairyOldCoot
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    218 months ago

    Standing in line in the basement of the CS building at UofM to get access to a card punch machine and type up my Fortran 4 program.

    • @ChickenLadyLovesLife
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      18 months ago

      Damn, I just barely caught the tail end of the punch card world myself. I was ten in 1977 and an older friend on my street was taking an advanced computer science course at the local university which was still using punch cards for the intro courses. We would compose shit in BASIC and then stamp out all the cards and leave them in a slot in the CS building’s basement and then get a printout a few days later. It was my first exposure to the concept of debugging by just not having any bugs in the first place - which really helped me with C two decades later.

      • @shalafi
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        18 months ago

        Just a couple of years behind you and I totally missed it. :( Never even seen a punch machine IRL.

    • @bitchkat
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      18 months ago

      Not sure which UofM you mean but the one I went to, I paid the keypunch service on the West Bank to type up my programs. I still had to do it myself when debugging, but that saved me so much time.