My First Coding Job
Many moons ago, in a land far, far away. I wrote my first code when I was working my way through school as a night computer operator. I was so bad at being an operator that I thought they'd fire me, or move me into an accounting position. The reason I was so horrible was that the nightly job consisted of stacking thousands of cards into input hoppers on the computer, and placing critical control cards that had to be absolutely without error in exactly the right place in the stack. It wasn't an impossible job, but to an 18 year old with the attention span of a gnat, I made errors. When I made an error, part or all of the run was trashed and the day people had to rerun my stuff. In desperation, I started reading the manuals, all written in Spanish (Miami), to figure out how I could make the job easier to run and less prone to silly errors. The manuals, were excellently written with lots of examples and flowcharts. IBM really knew how to get the point across. It took me a few we...
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