@ACAElliott Punchcards or bust?
Tail end of punchcards, yep. Don't drop that deck!
@GreenSkyOverMe @ACAElliott 
I actually had to learn and code punchcard assembler (IBM 360 series, running OS/360!!) when I went to "computer school."
Paper tape, too.
I've never used it since, nor do I remember anything other than the tedium, and the litter. Much cardboard, and much confetti.
#FBPE @BlippyTheWonderSlug @GreenSkyOverMe @ACAElliott The best bit is when the box of punched cards falls off the back of your bicycle and distributes themselves along a mud-filled gutter.
Boxes of punched cards were where storage was at for students, you didn't get any useful quantities of actual disk space.
@TimWardCam @BlippyTheWonderSlug @GreenSkyOverMe
Yep. I coded in FORTRAN and the dropped deck happened more than once.
A friend coded in BASIC where the compiler/interpreter(?) would first sort the input by line number, so his code could survive a deck shuffle!
@ACAElliott @BlippyTheWonderSlug @GreenSkyOverMe Nothing so sophisticated for me. And I couldn't be arsed to punch line numbers in columns 73-80 of the FORTRAN cards anyway.
@ACAElliott @TimWardCam @BlippyTheWonderSlug Oh, that’s what the line numbers were for! (Besides GOTO)
@TimWardCam @BlippyTheWonderSlug @GreenSkyOverMe @ACAElliott a 'release' meant an elastic band around the deck.
A diagonal line across the spine of the deck marked with thick magic marker allowed for crude initial visual sorting of cards when the inevitable disaster occurred.
Fun times! 
@TimWardCam @BlippyTheWonderSlug @GreenSkyOverMe @ACAElliott
Fanfold paper. So much fanfold paper!
@kaybee335 @BlippyTheWonderSlug @GreenSkyOverMe @ACAElliott I've still got some. One of my assessed exercises.
This was Conway's Life. It was required to be on an unlimited size board, so was supposed to be an exercise in coming up with a data structure for a two dimensional sparse array, and beyond that we could do what we liked.
I thought it would be fun to design an input/control language and some reasonably clever ways to print the output (this was done as a batch job on a mainframe). The guy who marked it thought I'd gone way beyond what was expected!
@TimWardCam @BlippyTheWonderSlug @GreenSkyOverMe @ACAElliott you know you're hooked when...
I got hooked up in high school with a group that took advantage of a local university service to run free batch jobs in idle time from 8pm-6am. Drop your deck off and sometime in the next hour get a printout with your latest compile error! And repeat.
There wasn't much to do while waiting so the 'computer geeks' from all over the city would just sit around and talk. A late 70's version of a LAN party
@kaybee335 @BlippyTheWonderSlug @GreenSkyOverMe @ACAElliott We did our assessed exercises overnight on Friday, when no grown-ups were using the mainframe and it gave a decent turnaround.
Then we'd take it in turns to host the group to breakfast in our various colleges on Saturday morning before going to bed.
Except that as I went to Churchill I never had to pay for the breakfasts - although I did offer, nobody was ever interested in trekking that far out of town.