5 ms·
Kids, today! You have no idea how lucky you are. At the time of writing this code, there were no 32" color monitors, IDEs, code text editors, or source code man
by sizzzzlerz 10y ago
Kids, today! You have no idea how lucky you are. At the time of writing this code, there were no 32" color monitors, IDEs, code text editors, or source code management systems. Code was first written out by hand and then typed onto punch cards or paper tape. These were fed into a mainframe computer for assembly. If you made a mistake, you had to find cards (by hand), remove and replace them with corrected cards. Get the cards out of order, you were toast. In general, the only way to gain a big picture of the code was to print it out, often over and over. Needless to say, paper was in huge demand.
- liotier 10y agoAlso, for all but the richest programmers who had direct access to the computer, the typical experience was that you submitted your stack of cards at the end of the day and got a printout in the morning... Probably why my old programming teacher scorned our iterative approach to repeatedly stumbling upon syntax errors by hitting the 'compile' key and adding the missing commas.
- nervousvarun 10y agoYup..."back then" you would arrange all your cards in a shoebox and then take a marker and make a diagonal mark from top left to bottom right JUST IN CASE you dropped said shoebox on the way to class to turn in your homework/take home test. Without that mark there's no easy way to recreate the correct order of the punch cards. Source: dad was an engineering major in the early 70s.
- kjs3 10y agoI was an engineering major in the mid 80s. You still goddamn well did mark your card deck. Wide tip sharpie, top left to bottom right. I think they retired the punches after my freshman year or the year after.
- punchthrowaway 10y agoThis comment is extremely interesting to me as my first instinct would be numbering the cards w marker. But it makes far more sense to draw a line on the edge for visual sorting.
- lettercarrier 10y agoAnd... you always kept your card decks until you graduated.
- donarb 10y agoThe first six columns of IBM cards used for COBOL programming had sequence numbers that could be used to validate that program lines were in order.
- joezydeco 10y agoI'm curious what % of HN readers have ever written a program with line numbers...
- Zardoz84 10y agoZX Spectrum +3 user here
- rurban 10y agoEven punch cards, but more teletype-style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_tape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_tape The punchcards were considered uncool then, the tape was much better.
- fratlas 10y agoOur highschool software teacher forced us to write at least one program in a language that used line numbers to give us perspective. Great teacher.
- flashman 10y agoI'm curious what percentage have never done so, but would still recognise: > 10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD" > 20 GOTO 10
- lettercarrier 10y agoSince each punch card meant something, you really learned code. Watching out for memory and keeping track of registers was paramount (COMPASS was my HS and Freshman initial class). Syntax killed, but was overcome by hand writing code. The science of CPS courses had to be taught just to be able to pass the class via assignments. Writing an OS with punch cards was an entire term. We could get same day runs if we paid more or had our own account. There were 3 tiers of cost..
- woofyman 10y agoI'm 57 and a working developer. In school, It was a beautiful feeling if your card deck compiled, ran, didn't run out of CPU time, and produced the correct print out, the very first time.
- kjs3 10y agoIt was. But then (in my world) they replaced punched cards with Ada, which wouldn't compile anything until everything was correct. Those rare times when you actually thought long and hard enough to get everything right the first time or two...priceless. This was not a bad thing.
- shitgoose 10y agonever happened to me:) most of the time i used to receive my deck wrapped in thin printout with some compilation error.
- shitgoose 10y agoyep. that's why things used to work back then - because people actually were thinking about what they were doing.