
Programming in 1969: An interview with a pioneer – my mum - fagnerbrack
http://www.ilikebigbits.com/2019_07_08_programming_in_1969.html
======
mattrp
My dad was recruited out of college to write code. Upon showing up for work,
he was told they’d ordered the computer but it wouldn’t arrive for another six
months. In the meantime, They’d arranged time on another computer (one of only
two in the state) so he’d spend the day writing and then he and another guy
would load up their punch cards and drive an hour each night to load the other
computer and test the code. At one point they had an intern managing the
hundreds of cards representing the software they were writing. They came in
one morning and he joyously informed them he had decided it would be better to
sort the thousand plus cards by color.

~~~
dluan
Richard Feynman told a story that when he was at Los Alamos during WW2, he was
put in charge of the nascent computing group using the brand new IBM computers
to run physics calculations. The army recruited a bunch of high school math
whiz kids to handle all the punch card loading and running the machines, and
Feynman was in charge of the kids.

Eventually the pressure from Feynman to keep up the pace of calculation was so
great that the kids, keeping track of program progress in their heads, would
yell at him anytime he came into the computer room to ask a question because
it meant losing track and having to restart the programs which were many, many
cards. This meant losing days of precious time if they had to start over or if
a program broke.

Finally the kids got so stressed debugging (and failing to debug) these long
running programs that they devised a way to run multiple programs at alongside
each other by color coding the punch cards, and then recording break points in
the programs when they failed. This allowed them to keep the machines always
running with one kid in charge the different variants of the programs they
were running.

~~~
cdelsolar
There were computers with punch cards and programs during WW2? I thought the
first programmable computer was ENIAC (post-war)

~~~
hcs
These were semi-automatic calculators, the punch cards were all data. The
problem with distracting the workers was that they were mostly responsible for
_enacting_ the program!

[http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/34/3/FeynmanLosAlamos.h...](http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/34/3/FeynmanLosAlamos.htm)
, search for IBM.

------
tpmx
Another computing history story from Sweden:

Once when I was young (in the 80s) I found a roll of paper with punched holes
in them in our family's home. It turned out that my dad had taken a course in
"automatic data management" while studying economics at Lund University,
Sweden some time around 1963 or so. A course assignment had been to create a
few programs in ALGOL. (I got that part because he had kept the course book.)

I spent so much time trying to decode this roll of punched tape. My dad wasn't
of much help. He didn't really understand why I was so excited about this.
Eventually I managed to decode the roll of paper, probably after getting some
kind of character set guide; I don't really remember. I wish I still had this
tape of punched paper... I do remember it was really exciting to write out the
ALGOL program in clear text as I painstaikingly decoded the punched tape.

I was that kid who was really into computing, but so starved of input, in the
middle of nowhere.

I think his exercises were run on:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BESK](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BESK)

"BESK (Binär Elektronisk SekvensKalkylator, Swedish for "Binary Electronic
Sequence Calculator") was Sweden's first electronic computer, using vacuum
tubes instead of relays. It was developed by Matematikmaskinnämnden (Swedish
Board for Computing Machinery) and for a short time it was the fastest
computer in the world. The computer was completed in 1953 and in use until
1966."

or

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMIL_(computer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMIL_\(computer\))

~~~
pacaro
I did the same with my mum's stacks of paper tape PL/I programs. At one point
I tried to build an automated reader that would interface with my BBC B, but
that took me longer than transcribing by hand did.

I remember being surprised at the time just how quickly I learned to read
papertape, just having the tape in my left hand with my thumb at the current
position and writing the character with my right hand, shimmy the tape, next
character

~~~
tpmx
Neat! I was going through this during a few years after I had just gotten a
handed down ZX81 from a relative some time around 1984, at the age of 7 or so.
I still remember that this relative sold the computer to my parents for 400
SEK (~$40). Pretty good "investment" in my career, I've gotta say.

(They also, while not being super well paid as municipal workers also sprung
for two more computers for me - one 8086 PC in ~89 and one 80486 PC in ~93. So
thankful. These things were so expensive back then, probably at least 1.5x a
monthly salary after taxes.)

------
fishnchips
Towards the end of the Cold War, my dad was a military man on the wrong side
of the Iron Curtain. As a consequence, I was a military brat, attending a
"military" preschool. These were tough times, and even paper was at a premium,
so one of the parents used to bring lots and lots of printouts that kids could
use to draw on the other side. One day it stopped abruptly, and we had no more
paper to draw on.

Years later I learned that those printouts came from air defense systems, and
counterintelligence was involved in our little tragedy.

~~~
einpoklum
Both sides of the curtain were the wrong side... for all sorts of reasons.
e.g. most the state structure of Nazi Germany just continued to exist
undisturbed in post-war West Germany; while in the east the Russians conducted
a rather brutal purge/execution campaign.

~~~
_ph_
German here. Before the comment gets misunderstood, after WW2 West Germany
became a democracy, it was no longer a Nazi state. What the commenter is
probably talking about is, that a lot of the administration officials from
Nazi Germany would still work in the democratic Germanys administration in
various roles. Some of them definitely were Nazis and should not have had a
place in any official job, others were just people doing their job under the
old and new government.

~~~
einpoklum
The National Socialist party was outlawed; and a few of its top officials were
sentenced to death or prison terms. But - it was "no longer a Nazi state" in a
somewhat superficial sense. It stopped being a Nazi state because a foreign
occupier threw them out of power, not because it had undergone a deep internal
social process.

As for "just doing your job" \- that's actually rather complex. If you were
delivering mail or sweeping the streets then, obviously, you have nothing to
answer for. But what if you were, say ,a high-level municipal official in a
town where the Jewish population was rounded up under your watch? What if you
were a police officer? A judge? A manager in Deutche Reichsbahn (the state
railway service)? A department manager in a government ministry? A faculty
member in a university from which subversives and undesirable-race people were
cleansed? It's not as simple as just doing your job.

I'm not preaching to _ph_ here, just emphasizing that for a lot of people,
they were industriously pushing forward the Nazi state, and then at some point
the flags changed, the ideology changed, the rhetoric changed and now we were
all "no longer Nazis".

~~~
_ph_
It stopped being a Nazi state. As I wrote, yes, there were too many people
left in administration, who played to too important role in Nazi Germany, the
example you name is a very good one. But it also is very difficult to judge in
each case until you can prove the guilt of a person. So a lot of Nazis managed
to go unnoticed. But Germany was a functioning democracy ever since.

I am so picky on that point, because saying "Nazi Germany just continued to
exist" is very likely to give people, who are not familiar with Germany the
wrong impression[1]. Nazi Germany did not continue to exist. There is a lot of
valid criticism how society dealt with the Nazi regime, but it was (as a
regime) in the past.

[1] Some months ago, an American friend of mine was surprised to learn that
the whole continental Europe does drive to the right.

~~~
einpoklum
I didn't claim it remained a Nazi state, but that the transition was
superficial.

My point is, that - unfortunately - there isn't such a unbridgeable chasm
between a Capitalist democracy and a Fascist autocracy as people would like to
imagine. Ruling elites can turn the dial this way or that way without that
much change, even on the level of top personnel and organizational structures.

If faced with significant social upheaval, or other structural threats, many
democracies would very likely turn more authoritarian, more nationalist, more
racist, more corporatist - would become Fascistic. In fact, they do.

~~~
fishnchips
> unbridgeable chasm between a Capitalist democracy and a Fascist autocracy

Exactly. Alas, that’s what we’re seeing in Eastern Europe right now. Hungary
being the best example, Poland also though luckily slightly less so. I
wouldn’t call it Fascism specifically, more like conservative
authoritarianism, but still.

------
sprainedankles
> The four of us made a dating program where you would input men and women and
> their traits, and then generate a good matching between them with an
> algorithm of our own invention.

Could this be the very first "dating app"?! Amazing.

~~~
bklaasen
Nope! This is an area where software, society and gender overlap, so it's been
getting a fair bit of attention, most notably by Professor Marie Hicks:
[https://adanewmedia.org/2016/10/issue10-hicks/](https://adanewmedia.org/2016/10/issue10-hicks/)

------
jmull
Great story.

My somewhat similar one: In the early ‘50s my mother took the one and only
computer class her university offered. At one point a guy from the local
defense contractor comes in (!) and essentially offers everyone in the class
with a half-decent grade a job at the end of the year. She took them up on it
and that’s how she got into computers. She also claims she used to manually
bootstrap a computer using toggle switches to initiate a loader and then feed
it punch cards (when not in use, kept in a card-catalog cabinet like libraries
used to have). I guess I shouldn’t doubt it too much. She did used to bring
old (some used!) punch cards home from work for us kids to play with. I
suppose they must have been clearing out obsolete equipment and systems.

~~~
jibal
"I guess I shouldn’t doubt it too much."

How ELSE would you do it, on a machine with no ROM? We always had to manually
enter one instruction into memory to start up the card reader to read the
bootstrap card. (This was long before the PDP-11's that others have
mentioned.)

"She did used to bring old (some used!) punch cards home from work for us kids
to play with. I suppose they must have been clearing out obsolete equipment
and systems."

Old used punch cards were far more prevalent than new ones ... every time you
type a line into your computer and then delete or correct it, that's
equivalent to having an old punch card.

------
Koshkin
What’s interesting is that although the difference between computers of the
1960s and those we have today is greater than the difference between, say, a
horse and a fighter jet, the principles of controlling (programming) them are
still the same...

~~~
fishnchips
Do you mean the difference in power? I still find horses and fighter jets more
different than early and modern computers.

~~~
nine_k
Likely speed and user-visible complexity. A horse has a really basic
interface.

~~~
fishnchips
Not the debugging interface though :)

------
bboreham
Slight eyebrow-raise at “pioneer” - my mum was a programmer in 1956. She tells
me they didn’t have enough RAM to fit the whole program in. Nothing changes.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
My mom was also a programmer in the 1950s. She tells about one CPU where you
could use patch cords to change the meaning of the opcodes. My mind boggles.

~~~
noneeeed
One of my tutors at uni would get us to do presentations on old papers. I
remember one that described a novel very early GUI system. They built the
hardware by basically wiring two machines together at the bus level (one was
essentially the graphics card), and adding a bunch of additional
instructupions using TTL logic chips, it was immensely impressive.

------
stevesimmons
My mum ran the computing department in the Education Faculty at a university
in Australia from 1976. I was 6 years old then and would 'help' her at work
during school holidays and sometimes when I was ill.

My fond memories included:

\- Discovering the paper tape machine.

\- Writing stories on the card punch machine, one line per card.

\- Pressing buttons on the massive card sorting machine when noone was
looking.

\- Walking to the Computer Centre to pick up the output of my mum's previous
day's coding. If she was lucky, there was a thick stack of fanfold paper in
her pigeonhole. If not, just a couple of pages with the error message.

\- Around 1978, playing with her HP RPN calculator. It had an inbuilt reader
for programs on small magnetic strips. I typed in the example Moon Lander
program from the manual and spent a few hours figuring out how much thrust was
needed to land without crashing.

\- Some time around 1979 they got a computer with a video display and a
lightpen. And a 300 baud acoustic coupler.

------
blondin
> We created the programs, and once they were completed and tested we handed
> them off. Others were responsible for maintaining them, we just wrote new
> ones!

OMG! when have we stopped doing that?

~~~
hugi
If you ever find out, please share. I'd also love to hand most of my code to
other people and never see it again.

~~~
moonfern
Start from a data model you don't understand and use/write objects that force
your data into expected results. Make sure everybody involved sees a working
version

Writing this way is time consuming but ensures nobody including you wants to
maintain it or add features.

------
dspig
The photo of the flowchart template - it must have been the 80s when my mum
got one of these and gave it to me, but by then it was in a plastic wrapper
rather than a paper one. I guess everyone doing a IBM course got one.

~~~
breck
That stencil and the instructions are so cool—so well designed! So clear and
concise and useful. Seems like it would still be useful today, ~50 years
later. Nice job IBM. Loved this interview.

------
cpach
This sentence made me smile: _”We also used to serve cake on punch cards, so
they were quite versatile.”_

When my dad went to high school in the town of Skövde, Sweden he visited Volvo
and they also served cake on punch cards there :)

------
einpoklum
Most striking sentence:

> I needed the salary to get my own apartment.

Just think that with the starting salary of a non-academically-trained
employee (in a desirable position, but still) - you could reasonably buy your
own apartment.

~~~
detaro
I don't think it meant buying an apartment, but being able to rent one on her
own.

------
jibal
I too owned that IBM reference card, which I have since scanned and discarded,
and I still have that flowchart stencil.

------
wolco
These are all great stories. I wonder what everyone is doing now near the end
of your careers.

------
jugg1es
Wow I love this domain name.

