>>>Just waiting for "I programmed FoxPro for punch cards"
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>>My first programming, back in 1968, was breaking Veldman's Hierarchical Profile Grouping Analysis into subroutines that could be on our IBM Model 30 with 8K of core memory, i.e., .wire wrapped around magnets. In Fortran. Thank goodness for the self-teaching books from IBM on same. Punch cards were the name of the game.
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>>That's how I came to love programming, in fact. All because of a boring class on psychological personality theorists and because I couldn't stand the thought of doing a traditional end-of-course paper.
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>I took "Intro to Programming" as an elective in 1975. PL/C (which was a student version of PL/I) on punch cards. Took a bunch more courses that involved programming, including multiple Math courses (I was a Math major), before I graduated. Learned Fortran and IBM/360 Assembly language, but all punch cards. Pretty sure my first graduate courses used punch cards, too. When we finally got terminals, I was so relieved because I was a lousy typist. (Much better now, of course, after all these years, but still would waste tons of cards, if I had to use those.)
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>Tamar

I'm a wee bit younger -- first experience in computer programming was back around 1980 in 10th grade. Had enrolled in the Introductory Computer Programming course (offered under the Math department). First half of the year was spent writing programs on a CompuCorp programmable calculator -- with programs being fed in via punched cards (which were manually punched using an IBM Port-A-Punch). Second half of the year we had transitioned to the TRS-80 microcomputer (the year that I'd enrolled, the school had just acquired 3) and using BASIC. Would eventually dabble a bit in Z-80 assembly (didn't have an assembler, so would manually translate to numbers which I would then POKE into memory). At university would learn Pascal, then self-learn PL/I, FORTRAN, C, IBM/370, 6502 assembly, and x86 assembly.

Naoto Kimura