A Programmer's Lament

I loved computers when I first was introduced to them by my father. I was fascinated by them. I saw a large room full of fridge-sized boxes and a huge band printer that spewed white and-faint-green tractor feed paper at an alarming rate into a neat little pile.

In another room, down from the raised floor and down the hall, was the card reader room. There, users would drop huge stacks of punch cards into large readers that looked like huge mail sorters. The cards would get digested by the machine in one go and the resulting program, if accepted, would execute as a job in the queue of jobs looking to spew out the band printer in order.

http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102646086

Great picture of the deck of the Starship Enterprise, circa 1964:

And labeled:

That's not at all what computers are today. There was no monitor, and the act of running a program meant moving from room to room with a small cardboard box holding your punch card stack in order for you, to get your printout.

Look at that keyboard on the card punch machine!

You had to tap out your (most likely handwritten) FORTRAN program card by card, entering lines in 80 columns or less. The 80 column standard for terminals (VT-100, for example) comes from the line length of punch cards.

What fascinated me about the all this was the fact that this machine was able to do math really really fast. It could be applied to just about anything that could be described with numbers. The potential was amazing. I also found a $10 bill someone had dropped in the cafeteria of the building on the Michigan State campus. Being 5, I couldn't conceive of that much money and couldn't believe my luck. I showed it to the lady at the counter and she told me I should find the person who might have lost it. I knew I wasn't going to be doing that.

That was my first glimpse of a computer.