Super Computing Today...

We were all better off in the era of punch cards!

You obviously never had to write engineering programs onto punch cards. I can assure you that we were NOT better off. I used semi perforated cards where you punched out the holes with a stylus to create the machine code (and then removed all the hanging chads, but we didn't have a word for chads back then). That was on the worlds first desk top computer and I was the only person at work who could program it. I used to blag access to an IBM1907 in my university engineering department and could run a program in ten minutes that would take me four hours at work. Prior to using the desktop the calculations took a couple of engineers 2/3 days by manually iterating up to 30 variables up to ten times. One innovation I made was to use electrical insulation tape to attach individual cards into a string so that each card would pull the next one into the slot rather than having to feed them in one at a time by hand.

I said, "We were all better off in the era of punch cards!"

I didn't mean, "We were all better off using punch cards!"

Agreed about the era, not the punch cards themselves.

My first computing experience was in pre-calculus in high school, and we used a Monroe programmable calculator (sort of a computer, not much memory, about like me) that had to be fed the chadhangyless punch cards.