20 is highly overrated. Back then, Karol and I were newly married, I was still in college, and we were broke.

Empty nesting, on the other hand, is highly UNDERrated - it's like dating, except this time we have money. And grandchildren to spend it on!

Same here. I remember those days of punching a thick deck of cards, submitting it to be run - then repunching the first error it found, resubmitting it, repunching the second error, resub....I break into a cold sweat just remembering it.

Did some simple application programming on the NCR Century (?) system the savings and loan I worked for had. (Remember S&Ls? Great business model: borrow short and lend long during double-digit inflation.)

Those were NOT the good old days - these are!

360/model 40 for me, had removable disk packs. Strange thing was the center hub aluminum brakes were not round until at full speed. At startup they sqeaked and whined. One Sunday starting up the machine from powerdown ( I had just finished reading Congo!) they made quite a racket... I listened from down the hall, way too spooky after reading that book! Every programmer should start on punch cards!!!

John

I did also. Used the same computer center as Pika.

I remember my old FEA professor talk about it. Does that count?

I remember punch cards, and I had a friend in SoCal that ran a huge computer room filled with machines that used big reels of tape that they spent all night changing.

My first computer was a Commodore 64. Then a Mac Plus. Today's smartphones are way more powerful, and useful, than either of those.

My perl looks like C code - at least that is what I'm told =).

I took Fortran and Quick Basic in High School - and one of my earliest memories of my father was going to work with him when he was called in for emergencies - he was a Main Frame operator and then later a main frame programmer. So I remember punch cards and these huge tape reels.

I have so far been able to squeek by not learning Java or PHP or Ruby on Rails... Java is the only Computer Science class I dropped way back when - I really don't like it. But... work is forcing me to learn it <sigh>. It was on my "other kind of list", but that is how the cookie crumbles. =)

For me it was PASCAL on punch cards. At least it was a summer college night course so we were the only ones using the main frame and it didn't take hours to be told you had a mistake in your second line

Not much on my not list. I'll try most anything once, especially if someone esle if footing the bill