I also learned on an IBM 1130. At the very end of the era of punched cards. With 029 keypunch. During my 1st semester a new (not IBM) minicomputer with two C

I also learned on an IBM 1130. At the very end of the era of punched cards. With 029 keypunch. During my 1st semester a new (not IBM) minicomputer with two CRT terminals was installed. Macros had been written on the new system by school staff so that you could change a few control cards and run your existing deck on the new system. Some people would run their jobs on the 1130, but you had a choice. The new system had a very small tabletop high speed punched card reader. Had a huge fan that blew air through the deck causing all the cards to separate and the weight on top of the cards to lift. It was fun to watch the deck "expand" like a blown up balloon. It could not read card at a time. It read in the entire stack of loaded cards at very high speed and spooled it to disk. These jobs ran (up to 3 concurrently) in background, along with any interactive CRT users. Then printout of your job would come out on a printer that was way faster than the printer on the 1130. Some people stuck with the 1130 because there were minor differences in the compilers. So it wasn't necessarily magically transparent to run your job on the new system by just swapping a few cards. There were initially two interactive CRT terminals. (Beehive) I asked a lot of annoying questions. There was now about three feet of manuals bolted to a table in the keypunch room. I made a point of reading it. After more questions, I was able to log in using an interactive terminal. I was encouraged. I was surprised that very few people expressed any interest in doing this. I could type my code into a file. Compile and run it. Send my printout to the printer. Come back to terminal, edit some more, etc. Fast turnaround. No more throwing out an entire card over a single character typo. People who watched over my shoulder became interested. I showed a few people how to edit, and compile and run their programs, spool to printer, etc. Soon there were sign up sheets for 30 minute blocks on the two CRTs. In the 2nd semester the school realized they needed more CRT terminals and fast. Some people did continue to use keypunch and cards because those were now less in demand and often not in use. Those were fun days.