When I was young, way back in high school, I was one of the lucky kids that chose to take the FIRST EVER “Computer Programming 101” class at my high school… To learn to program we used a Teletype model 33 for writing our programs. To “Save” the program, we used the Paper tape punch… to restore our program, we again used the paper tape reader to reload the program (disk space was a premium in those days).
QUESTION… How many of you ever got the great opportunity to use one of these awesomely noisy devices? Choose as many options as are applicable.
I used a Model 33
I used a card punch and card reader because we didnt get access to a computer directly
What is a paper tape? never heard of it
Did it actually only work at 110 baud? wow that is slow
my dad used a 33, he got a summer job at the Montreal stock exchange at age 14, sorting and entering punched cards from the trading floor on a 33 into the timeshare computer over at McGill University
Talk about uphill to school both ways in the snow here lol. I do have an appreciation for those veterans who helped shape the computing landscape we all enjoy today though.
The oldest (rather lowest level, I suppose) I’ve gotten is writing Assembly. Truly awful. I can’t imagine having to do punch cards or the like.
I still remember my dad telling me a story about how he took a programming class in college. The campus only had one computer, so he had to walk his punch cards down there for them to run it. He tripped one time.
I used the card punch then went to z80 assembly programming, where each instructions had to be entered manually… one mistake and we had to redo the whole thing !!!
@timshuwy, in my sophmore year of college I got to run the card decks in the computer room! Everyone would hand me their decks because I had special clearance to run the decks. There were only a handful of people allowed into the computer room. In my senior year, no more card decks! Everything was done on-line…lol! By that time, I was hired as a computer operator that assisted students in the computer center.
I can relate with the Assembly language and my Dad has a similar story from college! Something also about a punch card being bad possibly and then him having to re-submit all of the punch cards over again…Eck! Sometimes I wish I would have started out back then just so I would have an even deeper appreciation for computers today.
Suffer definition: to save your program, you had to type “list”, then turn on the paper tape punch, then press return… THEN waiting 2-3 minutes for the 110 baud modem to download your 30-40 lines of code (all less than 80 characters long). Then turn off the paper tape punch and tear it off, roll it up and store in your Pee-Chee folder to take home. to restore your program, The next day… you have to come back in, log into the 110 modem (2-3 minutes) and then load the paper tape into the reader, and press the read button, THEN wait another 2-3 minutes for the 30-40 lines of code to upload so you can continue to edit.
They’re still teaching this in school (at least when I was in college).
We’d get docked on a Java/C++ program if any one line was longer than 80 characters.
Interesting to hear about the history. They never told us why, just “do it”.
originally 80 character limit was because that was all that fit on the original IBM punch card. Teletype machines also only had 80 characters in width… why? because the type face of the typewriter was at 10 characters per inch… the paper was 8.5 inches wide… that leaves a 1/4 inch margin at each side…
Later when “dump crt terminals” came into being, they had an 80 character wide by 24 character high screen (it was truly amazing)… a few years later, some terminal manufacturers added a 25th “status” line that you could set values to by sending special control codes and text.
BUT THEN LATER… they came out with 132 wide CRTs… and text editors that supported 132 wide text… programming got wild and crazy with the new limit.
Speaking of CRT Terminals… how many people used a SOROC Terminal?
TRIVIA QUESTION… anyone care to guess what this logo means?
(HINT… the LOGO and the (scrambled) company name DO have something to do with each other)
Back when I was in high school, our introduction to computer science was in math class. We were taught BASIC and used punch cards that weren’t actually punched. They were marked with the good old #2 pencil.
Simple programs to demonstrate using variables, for loops, if then, etc… you’d markup your cards and turn them in to the teacher who would then take them to the “computer lab” to run them.
The output was to a surprisingly fast printer. Your program always ended with a PAGE command which was like a formfeed, in that it would just advance the printer paper to provide separation between each students output. This was because everyones cards were loaded and all their programs run one after another.
To be fair, this was old tech at the time. The school also had PETs. But the punchcard computer was the only way all the students could get computer time. And many of us had “personal computers” at home. Like Timex Sinclair, Vic20, and I had a TI-99/4A.
I was using punchcard computer in 11th grade, and then a original Machitosh my freshman year of college just 2 years later.
Oh, I lived this era too. The first printers were like typewriters and the line was printed left to right and fancier printers also printed right to left to save time on the carriage return. And THEN they came out with the bar printers that printed a whole line top to bottom at once. That was pretty cool and crazy fast at the time.
and my Dad has a similar story from college! Something also about a punch card being bad possibly and then him having to re-submit all of the punch cards over again…Eck! Sometimes I wish I would have started out back then just so I would have an even deeper appreciation for computers today. 
