Mr.Todd’s WayBack Machine
Imagine yourself sitting down to write a software program. What does that look like? Most likely you are sitting in front of your laptop or flat screen and opening up an appropriate development platform, right? Now imagine this… in 1980 when I was programming, it was sharpening a pencil and tearing off a sheet of COBOL programming paper. Everything from the Job Control Language (JCL) which was how to instruct the IBM machines that read your code, to formatting the report that was normally generated as a result of processing the data (which is why they called it Data Processing (DP) and not (IT) was written by hand. From there it went to the keypunch operators who would take your code and create a deck of punch cards that would eventually be read into the reader of the mainframe and processed. You would typically only get one turnaround a day that would be full of errors for you to correct, which you would do and try again tomorrow. I started with IBM 370 Assembler language, at least COBOL was English! We all stand on the shoulders of those that came before us.
