How we had to code???
In the early seventies, our year at school was the first to do 'computer studies' - this was back in the day when you learned how to program, rather than just learn how to use MS Office programs.

At school, we didn't have any computers so we sat in a computerless classroom with all of the other usual normal classroom things. However, for one lesson a week, we used to go to the local college which also didn't have a computer (this was 1974) but they did have a teleprinter and a modem (rubber cups jub) so they could phone up the 'Borough Computer' and we could communicate directly with it.

So, writing programs went like this:
1 At our school, write your program down on a coding sheet(s) (80 columns wide by 25 lines high) - this is a sheet of paper by the way;
2 hand it in with everybody else's work;
3 wait a week;
4 in the lesson the following week, we would get back our original coding sheet, a bundle of punched cards and a number of sheets of the wide paper with the green lines on it. On that, we would have a listing of our program (so that we could see that it had been input correctly by the punched card operator) and any program output.

Hence, we learned how to write computer programs without a computer - one was used only when it was needed to run.

Interestingly, I wrote a program that would (sort of 'in theory') do a square root calculation using the Raphson Newton method. I had set the loop to exit when one number equalled the number of the previous itteration so, if it hadn't have failed to run because of a punched card operator error, it would probably have been running for many months.

(Edited for spelling)
(MataChode is investigating substitute activities on, Sun 29 May 2016, 12:39, 1 reply)

Luxury
in my day we just had ones and zeros and sometimes we ran out of ones and had to make do with just zeros. And if you tell that to the young people today, they won't believe you.
( buffet_the_appetite_slayer ٩(●̮̃•)۶ jacked in to the ICE on, Sun 29 May 2016, 23:27, closed)