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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

> you Grey Breads remember using C++ and MFC, etc.

I remember submitting my BASIC program on IBM punch cards. Using a card punch machine taught one to not make typos. You youngsters with your backspace keys!

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Does anyone else remember using a hard-copy terminal? It's hard to even think about how I would edit, compile, debug and run programs where everything you typed or was echoed back, including passwords, was printed out on a paper roll. Want to look at your command-history? just grab the paper and look. Of course there was no fancy vi screen-oriented editor. We had ed and liked it!

We had a teletype machine at my school in 1980 connected to the local authority mainframe. There was nearly always a queue to type your own program but you could write it out on a sheet of paper (one character per box) and get a printout of somebody who had typed it in for you. When they made a mistake your program didn't run and you had to send it again the next week.

and I'm only 50!

I certainly do. I found even punch cards preferable. The awkwardness of the input method meant that I stayed away from tech for almost 15 years after the first quarter of my freshman year in college.

You had literal patches though.

thank you for making me smile during these horrible days.

I'm actually not kidding. My first programs were done on punchcards back in 1974 or 1975. I then moved on to ASR-33s (barf), DECWriters (much better) and then ADM-3A glass terminals (heaven - a working backspace!).

Using a text editor today is not much different than an ADM-3A, it just has more rows and columns on it and the font is slightly, but not much, nicer. (Why do the console fonts suck these days? Jeez)

Edit: the first screen editor I had ran on an ADM-3A and was a TECO macro. I think TECO was the first "tty noise" programming language.

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