> it had completely slipped by me that as late as the early 80's programmers were just still using pen and paper. Somehow, I have tended to imagine the days were thats what it meant to be a programmer to have existed in the same context as Alan Turing
seconded.
but then in another 15 or 20 years, people will probably be like, "wow, you needed a second monitor just to read documentation?" or "10 million lines of code was an acceptable size for a single application?" or something similar.
much respect & sorry about trampling the flowers, sirs.
Even when programmers had their own terminals, on a busy mainframe the queue time for compile jobs could easily be many hours. It really paid to spend time "desk checking" your code for typos and logical errors. It was faster than letting the compiler do it.
I would guess those programmers made sure they had perfect penmanship, I wouldn't have wanted a typist to mistake my colons for simicolons.
I wounder if the act of physically writing out the program on pen and paper actually made it stick for viscerally in the programmers head?