We've certainly come a long way... I remember using a small TV for the monitor, and a cassette recorder for storing programs and data, for my first two computers: a TI 99/4A and a Tandy Color Computer II. But man, were they fun! I wasn't much into games, but more into the programming. A heck of a lot more fun than the mainframe we had to use in my first programming class (Fortran) in college. I'm looking at ARM based Windows laptops for my next computer. I'm not in a hurry; my Intel Win 10 laptop is still running fine for now. But I believe ARM CPUs will eventually take over the Windows laptop market.
I had the early 4K Color Computer (1980) with the cassette drive. Upgraded it over time to 64K and a disk drive. Like you said way better than when I had a surveying class in college (early 70's) and had to write a program for it to figure the area of a plot of land we surveyed. Do the cards....leave them overnight to run .... find out in the morning the program didn't run....make changes leave them the next night....repeat.....repeat. I was one of the few in the class that stuck with it and wrote a program that ran. I think I learned more about programming with the color computer in a week or less than I did that semester. Almost instant feedback...I loved it. The color computer led to me opening a computer store in '84. By '89 I had too many employees and headaches where it wasn't fun anymore. Sold the business and thought I had enough to retire on at 45. After moving and building a house in Moab, UT I found I didn't have enough to be retired so moved 70 miles south, built and opened a trading post selling mostly Native American art and operated it till I did actually retire at 62. Haven't regretted it for a moment and would of been happy if I would of stayed retired the first time. Sumner
I started college the first semester in which we did not have to submit any programming assignments on punch cards. But there were many upper-classmen that still used punch cards. I saw one drop his box of cards at the top of a stairwell. Not pretty... But they had sorters that would re-order a deck for you. Mind you, we edited and submitted our programming assignments (in Fortran, what else?*) on teletype-style terminals, using JCL to invoke the compiler, execute the compiled program, and store the output file back in our directory. The next semester all those paper terminals were replaced with CRT terminals. BTW, some of you may remember login password prompts would print out several strings of dense characters on top of each other. On a display terminal it just looked like the last string (usually ########) that you would type over with your password (and could see what you typed, until it scrolled off the top of the screen.) But on a paper terminal (e.g. Teletype), that was to black out the area where you typed your password, so nobody could dig your session print-out out of the trash and steal your password. Note also that post-login welcome screens always had enough lines to scroll the login/password off the top of the screen before issuing the first command prompt and pausing, waiting for your command. This was to make sure a CRT terminal would not sit there on the screen, exposing your login and password if you walked away for a few minutes. "And now you know... the rest of the story." *Well, my sister, a year behind me, was an accounting major. I helped her debug a few of her COBOL programming homework assignments. What a steaming pile of miscreant effluence COBOL was!
