Parallel punch cards! I took a FORTRAN programming class in high school, maybe 1979. We had no keypunch and had to color in cards with a sharpie. Once a week we packed our cards on a school bus to go to the one high school that had an IBM Mainframe. We’d get a printout and maybe there was time for a quick fix, but usually it was wait til next week.

I rather liked it, and made CIS my major at Uni in 1981…. And hated it. I changed the year after to Geology. I was a grad student in geology at Arizona State University in 1988 when they got from Apple a set of Mac Plus machines for a lab for students. They saw my little bit of tech experience and offered me a TA running the lab, helping students, but also experimenting. A first project I did was a gravity simulation program written in… MacFORTRAN! Crazy unlikely paths.