[Allan]

Makes me feel old having my first computer experience
writing programs in a BASIC predecessor, FORTRAN,
entering my programs and data on punch cards

OK everyone.
I wrote my first program on an LGP30
not on punched cards
but on punched tape
in machine language
in which numerical constants
had to be 'input' in binary.

Can anyone beat that?

[Mitchell]

I wrote my first program on an LGP30 not on punched cards but on punched tape in machine language in which numerical constants had to be 'input' in binary.
Can anyone beat that?

Not me.

I wrote BASIC programs on punched paper tape, and FORTRAN and Algol programs on punch cards.

Some years later, I did quite a bit of 6502 machine-language programming in hexadecimal on an Apple II+. (Editing the numerical machine-language instructions got tiresome, primarily because inserting an instruction often required adjusting nearby relative branches, so I wrote an assembler in BASIC for the Apple. It was slow, but it worked. Later on I got the very nice LISA assembler for the Apple -- does anybody else remember that one?)

I still know a lot of the numerical opcodes for the 6502. I don't imagine I'll ever need that information again :-).

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Not me!

My paper tape experience was with main frames.

Debugging paper tape reading programs with paper tape supplied by telephone switching equipment recording toll calls for purposes of billing customers . What a pain!