Forget fancy AI or modern vibe coding tools. My journey started with something much more physical: “Painful Paper Coding.” My very first program was born on a stack of yellow punch cards.
Long before the cloud, we had the giant mainframe. To get these huge machines to do anything, I had to follow a strange old ritual…
- Step one: Buy a stack of blank cards. They were cheap – about 25 cents for 50 tickets to total frustration.
- Or, I could “borrow” a few cards from a friend or a rival lab when no one was looking ๐
- Next, find a free keypunch machine. I had to type out my code line by slow, painful line.
- The concluding step involved delivering my stack of cards to the data center’s small window, where the “high priests” (the operators) would process them through the massive computer (IBM S/360).
After waiting 15 minutes or so, Iโd get a big printout, find one tiny typo, and have to start the whole nightmare all over again.
Still, I loved every minute of it.
I loved the noisy machines and the massive computer. I even enjoyed the careful planning and flowcharting I had to do before punching a single card.
I enjoyed the challenge of writing efficient code to save money and time, and I loved the feeling of being in total control of my code.
Even with today’s smart tools and easy coding, I still miss that feeling.
