Never got to work with paper tape much other than being around them in a DEC shop for a short period but you'll enjoy this; we were early with ATM machines (offline of course) and they'd create a paper tape of each transaction. We'd collect the tapes, run them through a TI mini-something and that'd print out coupons with MICR encoding. Talk about the bad old days.
You can keep the crown, these days I'm lucky if I can code my name....
>>You can keep the crown, these days I’m lucky if I can code my name.
Nope — I couldn’t write a COBOL-68 segmentation procedure if you put a gun to my head.
Yeah, them 3350’s beat the heck out of the drums and 3330’s. But we was programming on the card-punches (we were poor that way — this rich sites coded on coding forms and had keypunch operators to actually do the card punches).
But I had a friend whose first job was running inside the Truly Old School mainframes and replacing the vacuum tubes when they blew. His first language was, indeed, Autocoder.
We touch back to the prior generation, who touvh back to the origins.
But, in the same way kids today don’t know R&R roots and we did (ask about Buddy Holly and his importance to anyone younger than 45), people today don’t know what built the Internet and modern computing.