And you tell kids today and they don't believe you

[Ian]

I once typed in a game, from the pages of 'Input' magazine.

In about 1981 I had to write my own assembler on a development board a bit like a KIM1. No BIOS just toggle switches on the bus. First write it all out on paper, then flick the switches then hit store. Then use that assembler so I could input mnemonics to write the actual program to do a simple calculator on the seven segment LEDs.
Then at the end of the day there was no storage so it was all lost when we switched off so next time you started by inputting the assembler again.

And that's why I'm a sysadmin / DBA not a bloody programmer

[Mr. Dazzle]

That's a side of computers which has always fascinated me. Both my rents worked for IBM nearly their whole careers and my wife and brother both work in IT, I've been surrounded by computers and computer people my whole life.

I have no real interest in IT, but computer science , as in "what are all them switches actually doing?" is pretty interesting to me.

Sadly, it all becomes maths pretty quickly

[Yorick]

I once typed in a game, from the pages of 'Input' magazine.

In about 1981 I had to write my own assembler on a development board a bit like a KIM1. No BIOS just toggle switches on the bus. First write it all out on paper, then flick the switches then hit store. Then use that assembler so I could input mnemonics to write the actual program to do a simple calculator on the seven segment LEDs.
Then at the end of the day there was no storage so it was all lost when we switched off so next time you started by inputting the assembler again.

And that's why I'm a sysadmin / DBA not a bloody programmer

I was sysadmin/dba. Means you could bodge and fudge everything to suit

[Saga Lout]

It's 1989, the conversation at work turns to music. Somebody mentions Swing the Mood by Jive Bunny, I say I prefer the Glenn Miller original and my 20 year old colleague says that's probably because it's "music from your era". Amused by this I ask, rhetorically, "How old do you think I am?" "About 50" he replies!
I was actually 40. I later mentioned this to another colleague who pointed out that to a 20 year old, anybody over 30 has one foot in the grave.
And remembering this made me realise: that 20 year old kid? He's now 55 or 56 and probably telling 20 year olds that today's music is just noise.