I wrote my first program in Fortran and used to carry a tray of 500+ punched cards across Pitt Street, Sydney to run it at a batch terminal. I often wondered what would happen if I dropped the tray in the middle of Pitt Street!50 years ago, IBM created mainframe that helped send men to the Moon | Ars Technica:
When I started as a trainee with the Railways in 1970 I was learning on an IBM /360 model 30 using COBOL. The fellow who taught me, Laurie Watson, had already been through two generations of computers: unit record devices and IBM 1401. He did the conversion of apps from unit record to IBM 1401 Autocoder and then Autocoder to COBOL. He was a great fellow and very patient. He was heading towards 60 at the time and may well have been the first person to retire from the IT industry in Australia.
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