@th

In the early 1990s, I wrote Fortran code to generate the Revenue, Pieces, and Weight reports for the US Postal Service.

Every month we'd get a tape compiled from the Postal Data Centers, and hundreds of 5.25 floppies from small post offices and aggregate the data.

@th

I had recently learned Perl, but we couldn't use that because the codes and data had to be put on 9-track reels and made available to large mailers like Time Magazine so they could confirm the reports.

@emma did you load your programs face down, nine edge first?

@th

I wrote those on EMACS on a Data General Horizon.

I did have to run punch card decks for a couple of my classes at UT Austin in the 1980's.

Talking about cloud budgets these days (esp. Big Query jobs) brought back memories of seeing my Computation Center balance on the printouts from punch card decks, and jobs submitted to batch from the terminal.

@th Brings back memories of programming one of my first microcontrollers; a 68F11 a board sold by New Micros Inc iirc. It had FORTH build in and loaded programs via serial port. I quickly moved to assembler so I could store programs in the 256 byte EEPROM on the 68HC811 which was also a great chip for MIDI.