I did my first piece of programming at school when I was 15 or 16, in Basic, and it was a paper tape interface, 5 hole I think! We all traipsed off to the local computer magnates - Elliots, later GEC Elliots. Can you guess the year?
In 1961 I joined AEI as an Student Engineering Apprentice. A few months later (early 1962) I worked with programmer to produce printed instruction sheets for an operator of a machine tool; the sequence of instructions was optimised by a program so the component was made in the shortest possible time - a sort of forerunner of numerical control.
The computer was an Elliot 803B with thermionic valves, input/output by punched tape and filled a room the size of an average lounge. We had a similar machine at college on which I did a bit of programming. The company later used one of its own machines, an AEI 1010 with transistors, that filled a much bigger room and had punched card input/output.
Ah, the good old days when programs needed to be efficient because the power of the machine was a fraction of what we have on our desks now.
Terry.