I inherited most of the stuff from my dad's desk: coding pads, flowchart template, reference cards, books, periodicals, computer specific rulers and thingies. The only electrical thing on a programmer's desk back then was the lamp! Maybe a calculator for working out address offsets. I'd say Gesswein is the most likely to demonstrate using a PDP8 coding pad and hand-coding the assembler, then TOGGLING IT INTO THE FRONT PANEL (he probably can do most of that in his head by now!) The KIM, SYM and such made it a LITTLE easier with hexadecimal keypad & 7-segment LEDs. Alexander Pierson:
At the same time I was wrestling that, I did a historical paper on Pascal. In the process of researching it, I think that was the first time I was exposed to the concept of writing out a program by hand with pencil and paper before entering it onto a computer.
That's what I learned back in high school. A process that's served me well. THINK OUT the program first. PLAN all the tests to have confidence it really works. Niel Cherry's reply confirmed the merit of that work flow. And it let me work at home, away from the computer center. Keypunches were shared machines. You didn't compose at the keyboard. You minimised time at the machine by planning everything in advance, punch the cards as fast as possible and submit the job.
That blew my mind, seeing as never thought of a time before text editors and glass terminals.
It was an important turning point: from machine time being rare and valuable to people-time being more important.
I'm so used to instant gratification of finding syntactical errors and compiling at the drop of a hat.
Which is a more productive use of your time & attention. Be grateful! Mike Loewen:
Welcome to the early 1970s.
Colleges and high schools were still using punched card batch in 1977 and afterwards. The infrastructure was there: rooms of keypunches that only needed outlets vs. expensive terminals (the ADM3a was "cheap" at just under $1,000) and data lines for each terminal.
Write your FORTRAN program down on coding forms:
That's EASY compared to RPG II where every card type was a different format that was extremely column sensitive.
Then head to the keypunch room and punch your deck. Take it to the dispatch area and submit your job to the dispatcher.
Movies kinda show what it was like back then with the closed shop fishbowl-data-center. Only operators were inside to touch the machine. Now with "the cloud", we don't even get to see das blinkenlights and tapes-a-twirling. I still remember feeling so heartfallen when I learned that the FORTRAN "sense lights" might not actually light up anything. That's why I was so happy to use the LGP-21, where sense switches were REAL SWITCHES!
Come back in minutes or hours, depending on the load,
Or longer :-9
and retrieve your deck and printout. Review the output for syntax errors, keypunch errors and logic errors. Return to the keypunch room and punch new cards to fix the errors. Lather, rinse and repeat.
You beat me to it! I was about to say the same thing. -- jeffj