Starting or Re-Starting?

Of course I used to code sometime in prehistory!
Which other idiot wants to learn to code again!!

But it was breadboards, 4044/8088s and assembly in those days until something hot came up on the horizon - DOS 1.0. Disk Operating System or something!! Had to struggle to figure it out as the green screen just sat there staring back at you without saying a thing! Not even a prompt.


All those little crumbs could fall right into those holes leaving just the slices on it


"You can setup a prompt of your choice, if you want", said our computer instructor, who had this devil-may-care attitude and the philosophy that computers were for those who were interested in it. Only! We had to pick up a language before we went for our engineering degree programs and Fortran was the language of choice.
My nemesis
 And the work started on some sort of gridded paper that looked similar to graph paper only you wrote characters on it, not lines.

The coding sheet

Computers and I din't get along well. I did fancy the idea of letters you type on a keyboard appearing on the screen, but that was it. And fortran was drab and pointless. We were yet to start to get our head around the fact that it was just a tool, a FORmula TRANslator, that was supposed to be used to solve engineering problems. Okay, maybe it should be introduced AFTER our engineering program started as we first needed to see what the problems were in the first instance. That could get our heart rate up above 0 in programming classes, maybe!



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