My father used to be a programmer back in the 1960's for the IBM 700 series mainframes, writing programmes and simulations in FORTRAN 4 (and I think some assembler, too) for our now-defunct shipbuilding industry (Sweden). The stories he told me about how debugging back then included manually going through series upon series of punchcards (often by laying them out on the floor in his house and crawling while reading) humbles me somewhat to how far we've come in the industry where debugging something is as easy as pressing a button and getting instant feedback. Back then results from a compute had to be processed overnight even for relatively simple programmes.

One thing we've seemed to regressed on though is the professional stature of our industry - back then private offices were the norm and the Orwellian open-office hellscape of today was no where to be found.