Believing is seeing
I have had a keen interest in computers for many years. In fact, I wrote my first computer program in 1969. That was a long time ago by anyone’s standards, but in terms of computer development it was way back in the early days! To put it into perspective, there was no internet, no such thing as a PC and Microsoft did not exist. In fact Bill Gates was only 14 years old.
I cannot remember what the program was for, but I do remember that the programming language was Algol and that each line of the program was punched by me sitting at a kind of typewriter, onto special cards – one card for each line of the program. The cards went into a reader which the computer then accessed. I had to carry the cards to the reader and I was very aware that if I dropped the cards I would have to sort them all out into the correct order or the program would not work properly. The computer itself was the size of a house. I remember seeing the computer’s hard disk: it was a sheet of metal about 5 feet in diameter.