In 1979, I went to university to receive course advice in my chosen field, the adviser I got was trying fill the empty courses, not recommend what was best for

In 1979, I went to university to receive course advice in my chosen field, the adviser I got was trying fill the empty courses, not recommend what was best for me. One of the courses was computer programming in Pascal, offered for the first time. There were several hundred students enrolled and they ran duplicate day and night sessions of the course. The course was designed to make 'trial and error' programming as difficult as possible, so we would learn enough about the syntax to write working code straight up. For the 250 odd students they had 8 card punch machines. You had to punch out your cards, wrap them up and put them in the mail to be run overnight, you went back to pick up your finished program the next day. The 8 card punch machines were hammered 24/7 and by the end of the second week two broke down. A week later one of them would not punch the letter 'B'. Unfortunately the course took up as much time as my other 3 subjects so I withdrew, but I did learn a lot about programming, especially when I bought a decent programmable calculator. I did go on to do a bit more programming but it wasn't my main job.