pic: The warranty, voided

[GeeTwo]

By 1980 when I took intro FORTRAN, things had improved - I rarely had to wait more than half an hour for a punchcard machine. This is because the upperclassmen had access to teletype terminals - key presses went right to the computer, and paper came rolling out right in front of you!

I also remember my first infinite loop. The 200 page printout quota saved a couple of forests, but left me enough paper to make an awesome Christmas tree for the Physics Club study room.

I still have a couple of small (~100 cards each) decks from the latter days of punch cards at the office around 1991 or 1992. I've had to change the rubber bands at least twice.

Slide Rules! I learned to use a slide rule back in middle school from Isaac Asimov's book. I didn't switch to using a calculator until the eighties when the TI-30 (LEDs, HD batteries last about 2 hours) dropped below about $75. I really wished everyone had used slide rules a few years later when I was teaching labs as a graduate student. By this time, 4-bangers were pretty common, and scientifics not uncommon. It was a distinctive form of torture to grade lab papers in which students measured distance with a meter stick and time with a stopwatch, and reported velocities to eight significant digits. To this day, I have a slide rule on my desk at work. I only use it a few times a year, but sometimes it's quicker than a six-year-old PC.

In hindsight, grading those lab reports did help prepare me for FRC mentoring. A little.