Maggie's Farm

I started in programming in the early 60's although I did not use COBOL until 1972. Everything back then was machine language or assembler. I remember reading about Ms Hopper in the 60's but it may not have been all that PC back then because atlhough she was called the mother of COBOL it was well known she didn't develop COBOL and in fact if memory served me right that was attributed to 5 men.

Machine language programs tended to somewhere between magic and gobbledygook. Assembler after a few years of programing in raw machine language was like finding the Rosetta Stone. Cobol was tedious (but not as bad as RPG) and yet could be straight forward, read like a book and self documenting. Fortran was like finding your long lost twin, it was elegant, powerful, succinct and seductive. I would write programs in Fortran just for the fun of it to see if I could do something different. C, basic and Pascal were fun and interesting . But for raw power and really geeky stuff machine language is where it's at.

I didn't "like" punching my own cards but generally I did it. When we had key punch staff they required that your input forms be prefect and then they punched exactly what you wrote. This made the front end process take twice as long. However if you punched the cards yourself you only wrote the minimum and the process was faster and in fact it was an opportunity to check your work and find errors. So all in all it was better to punch your own IBM cards than it was to have the keypunch people do it for you.