On Fri, 20 Jan 2017, Alexander Pierson via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
At the same time I was wrestling with 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 blew my mind, seeing as never thought of a time before text editors and glass terminals. I'm so used to instant gratification of finding syntactical errors and compiling at the drop of a hat. Then again, that dates me as an individual...
I should really give the alternative a try some time for the sake of perspective.
Welcome to the early 1970s. :-) Write your FORTRAN program down on coding forms: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/FortranCodingForm.png Then head to the keypunch room and punch your deck. Take it to the dispatch area and submit your job to the dispatcher. Come back in minutes or hours, depending on the load, 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. While punched cards and keypunches trigger my nostalgia, I also prefer the "instant gratification" of frequent compilation. Mike Loewen mloewen@cpumagic.scol.pa.us Old Technology http://q7.neurotica.com/Oldtech/