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Grandpa showed me his Fortran punch cards from 1973 and I complained about setting up Python on my laptop
Last month I was cleaning out my grandpa's garage in Dayton and found a box of punch cards from a programming class he took back in 1973. He told me they had to wait overnight to find out if their code even ran, and one typo meant starting the whole stack over. Three days ago I spent 20 minutes mad because pip wouldn't install a package on my laptop. He just laughed and asked if my computer could tell me my mistakes right away. I keep thinking about that box, and I'm curious how many people here started with something way harder than the tutorials we complain about now.
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logan_thomas871mo ago
Did you ever stop to think about how much we take for granted with modern tools? I used to roll my eyes when older folks talked about walking uphill both ways to school, but reading your story about those punch cards actually made me stop and rethink things. Waiting a whole day just to find out your code had a typo sounds brutal, and here I am getting annoyed when my IDE takes ten seconds to load. It's easy to forget that all this convenience we have now came from people who dealt with way worse and still managed to build stuff. I guess my view changed because I always figured old tech stories were just people wanting to feel tough about the past. Now it seems more like they actually earned the right to laugh at us when we complain about pip.
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