• @ChickenLadyLovesLife
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    17 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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      17 months ago

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