Eric Raymon remembers:
I was writing some code the new-school way yesterday, prompting gpt-4.1 through aider, and for whatever reason my mind flashed back 50 years and the utter freaking enormity of it all crashed in on me like a tidal wave.
— Eric S. Raymond (@esrtweet) December 27, 2025
And now I want to make you feel that, too.
In 1975 I ran…
Yeah pretty much remember it all. The keypunch machine. Oh yes. There was no whiteout there. Punch a typo and eject the card forward. Then use the copy key to copy the characters from the old card to the new and be sure to lift your finger off the copy key in time else you’d copy the typo onto the new card. Now you have TWO bad cards in the stack that you have to remove before feeding them into the card reader tied to a PDP-11 that was connected via a dedicated serial link to the IBM-360 mainframe that would attempt to compile and execute your program as a batch stream. Usually two or three tries. Oh yes and when coding in FORTRAN-IV be sure to keep your program out of the collation field beyond column 71 on the punch card if you wanted the compiler to see it.
But it was heaven compared to my pre-college days wiring screws and rotary switches…
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