[sdiy] Learning electronics now - was Real cause of DIY death

[R. D. Davis]

Quothe jbv, from writings of Tue, Jul 19, 2005 at 04:05:49PM +0200:
> > So for my own part, I start feeling *very* old when it comes to that.
> 
> same here : I always have a big success when telling young
> trainees (22 to 25 years old) that I wrote my 1st computer   
> program on punch cards...
  
What great fun that was... writing the program, using the punch-card
machine to put the program on the cards then submitting the program on
the cards to the computer center and waiting, sometimes hours, to get
the cards back along with a printout on wide greenbar paper to find
out if the program worked or not.  One repeated that cycle until the
program was working right.

Imagine creating computer synthesized music that way, or worse yet,
having to rely upon nightly batch processing with the punched cards.
Thinking about that gives one an appreciation for relatively fast PCs
or Macs to run Csound on!

Then came terminals, but they weren't "full screen;" one had to use a
line editor.  Still, the fun of using WATFIV (Waterloo Five, a flavor
of FORTRAN V) made up for it... it sure beat risking contracting the 
dreaded "COBOL Fingers" disease from typing lengthy COBOL variable
names while using punched cards. :-)

By not being full-screen, I'm referring to a lack of cursor control;
it was like using ed on a UNIX box.  Speaking of ed, over the number
of people who are fairly new to UNIX who know nothing about using ed,
who never learned about UNIX from learn (that was a program on some  
older UNIX boxes that taught one how to use ed, sed, grep and all that
other good stuff), and want to know nothing about using ed, thinking  
that they'll never need to use it, amazes me.  Of course, during  
system crashes and other emergencies, like if the terminfo database is
messed up, sometimes ed is all that will work or is available, so it  
pays to learn about it.

-- 
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