...and the source code was stored on a deck of punch cards. Ah... the good old days when the toughest decision was, "do I add sequence numbers or live dangerously and don't."
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Looking for smudges on Marksense cards. Ick...
EDIT: Nightmares over smudges. I had one deck that refused to load properly. It was a batched system so you went to the 'computer center' with your rubber banded together deck of cards as if you were a heretic going to church. (One never addresses the hardware directly, you only conversed with the acolytes) You submitted the culmination of your life's goals unceremoniously to the box marked 'JOBS' (as I remember). And the wait began. The next morning, you had to go to the same 'computer center', and look at the printout hanging on the wall. It was sorted by your 'student number', and you followed that number to the right to get the job number, and see if the job lived to finish it's life, or died. It listed time to execution, and how many pages were printed, and the final result of the job. I can't remember the many options, but some were really not good.
After praying to the list, you went to the system of shelves that held 'the output'. If any...
The stacks were arranged by the first x-number of the job numbers that were active that night, plus some that no one bothered to pickup. If you were lucky, there was some printer paper enclosing your deck of cards. If there wasn't any, it was a bad thing...
You took the shreds of your future back to where ever you worked on your incantations, and poured over the output, IF you had any. Then you started pulling the cards you needed to change and grabbed fresh ones, and carefully marked them, and inserted them IN ORDER, and rubber banded the stack and trudged back to the Computer Center to start it all over again.
If you had a 'bad deck', and had checked every card in it, and it still blew up, you could submit the deck to be 'read', and get a printout of what the deck said to the reader. It was to be avoided unless you had the time to blow a whole day waiting for the output list of what the all seeing eye makes out of that precious deck. The worst outcome being that the deck was exactly as you programmed it to do. Oops...
And today? It's so much more simplistic. We can run hundreds of programs in a minute, debugging programs at will. Proof that those 'good old days' weren't really so good in some regards.
