me and software

 Back in the '70s software was something that humans had never done before. Fortran and cobal it seemed like where the two big languages. The c programming language came along right at that time frame. In high school we used basic. Programming was sort of mathematical but then things changed constantly because of loops and if statements. The high school classes were very easy, but college was different. In fact I got the worst grade I've ever gotten in a college computer course. Still there were computer jobs available when I graduated so that's what I got.

 And computer programming obviously has changed drastically. This is going to sound so sort of bizarre but my first professional computer programming job we wrote the programs on cards. You sat a card machine and you typed in each line of code and it produced a card, a paper card. You put all those cards together and you took them over to a card reader that read your program in and ran the program. The only way you could make some other kind of copy of it was to compile it and then put it on to magnetic tape. And then you could also keep the official copy of the code was on a magnetic tape also. So it sounds like something from like the 1800s I mean you know but there was no computers in the 1800s.