30 FINAL WORDS
I feel privileged to have lived in unique times. As someone who was born in 1956 I have witnessed the introduction of computers into our lives from the very beginning. At school I used logarithmic tables, during my first year at university I used a slide rule, by my second year hand held calculators had just become affordable.
I first learned to code in Fortran IV and submitted a stack of punch cards for batch programming each evening. The following morning, after my program had crashed, I would receive a ‘core dump’ to help me diagnose the errors in it. Over time the core dump would get smaller (providing of course my fellow students had not shuffled my punch cards while I was not looking) and eventually my program would work. ...
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