I'm a female and was a "computer programmer" for many years. My first job as a programmer must have been around 1965-66. The thing I remember is trays of punched cards which were fed into an IBM 1401 and transferred to a magnetic tape that was manually loaded on the tape drive. By manual I literally mean you took this 12-14" diameter heavy tape out of its case, put it up on a hub which you manually tightened, then lifted up the glass front, and punched 3 or 4 buttons above to tell it to start the vacuum and suck the tape down into its channels and make it ready to read, or write, depending on the directions of the program. When the program was on tape, it was taken to the larger computer (the first one I worked on was an IBM 7074) and each time that program was run it had to be installed, or a tape drive dedicated to the program being there the whole time the program was running. There were, I cannot remember for sure, but 8 to 12 tape drives. Patches were fed into the program once it was loaded and when the number of patches got unwieldy, the program was "reassembled". I cannot remember the name of the the programming language. It may have been Assembler Lanugage. OMG that was back in the dark ages but it all worked, just slower than the 7 year itch, and huge machines that were so hot they have to be air conditioned 24/7. Output was in the form of printouts, and magnetic tapes. The contents of the tapes were often transferred to punched cards which were sent to the other part of the organization to pull stock for shipment etc. You wouldn't believe the number of tapes we had, rooms full of them. Can't even imagine how I remember that. Several years, and jobs later I programmed the IBM 360, and 370, and somewhere in between there was another computer manufacturer, but I'll be darned if I can remember who that was. Eventually I got out of programming into management. When I left the field 30 years later we had IBM PC's on our desks, and the ability to send email within the organization, but not outside. We didn't, at least where I worked, have a network outside our organization, so security was simpler with no outside access. This ancient HP laptop I'm typing on now has more memory and obviously faster computing power than the 7074, and its likely that it has more storage capacity than those rooms full of magnetic tapes. I cannot imagine living without my computer. I'm pretty such I got my first desktop at home before I retired, and haven't been without a computer since then. I'm getting dumber though..in the early days of desktop computer the operating systems and concepts were pretty much alike between the big mainframes and the office desk computers. Now the operating systems are quite different, and that's not to even mention the notebooks, and the power of these cell phones. There's probably more and faster computing power on a cell phone than the first mainframes I programmed. I've lived in interesting and fun times. You cannot even imagine how it will all change in the next 30 or 50 years, assuming we don't blow ourselves to kingdom come first. Well, if you took the time to read this, I hope you enjoyed a trip back in time. Thanks...old former Female Programmer :-)
I'm a female and was a "computer programmer" for many years. My first job as a programmer must have been around 1965-66. The thing I remember is trays of punched cards which were fed into an IBM 1401 and transferred to a magnetic tape that was manually loaded on the tape drive. By manual I literally mean you took this 12-14" diameter heavy tape out of its case, put it up on a hub which you manually tightened, then lifted up the glass front, and punched 3 or 4 buttons above to tell it to start the vacuum and suck the tape down into its channels and make it ready to read, or write, depending on the directions of the program. When the program was on tape, it was taken to the larger computer (the first one I worked on was an IBM 7074) and each time that program was run it had to be installed, or a tape drive dedicated to the program being there the whole time the program was running. There were, I cannot remember for sure, but 8 to 12 tape drives. Patches were fed into the program once it was loaded and when the number of patches got unwieldy, the program was "reassembled". I cannot remember the name of the the programming language. It may have been Assembler Lanugage. OMG that was back in the dark ages but it all worked, just slower than the 7 year itch, and huge machines that were so hot they have to be air conditioned 24/7. Output was in the form of printouts, and magnetic tapes. The contents of the tapes were often transferred to punched cards which were sent to the other part of the organization to pull stock for shipment etc. You wouldn't believe the number of tapes we had, rooms full of them. Can't even imagine how I remember that. Several years, and jobs later I programmed the IBM 360, and 370, and somewhere in between there was another computer manufacturer, but I'll be darned if I can remember who that was. Eventually I got out of programming into management. When I left the field 30 years later we had IBM PC's on our desks, and the ability to send email within the organization, but not outside. We didn't, at least where I worked, have a network outside our organization, so security was simpler with no outside access. This ancient HP laptop I'm typing on now has more memory and obviously faster computing power than the 7074, and its likely that it has more storage capacity than those rooms full of magnetic tapes. I cannot imagine living without my computer. I'm pretty such I got my first desktop at home before I retired, and haven't been without a computer since then. I'm getting dumber though..in the early days of desktop computer the operating systems and concepts were pretty much alike between the big mainframes and the office desk computers. Now the operating systems are quite different, and that's not to even mention the notebooks, and the power of these cell phones. There's probably more and faster computing power on a cell phone than the first mainframes I programmed. I've lived in interesting and fun times. You cannot even imagine how it will all change in the next 30 or 50 years, assuming we don't blow ourselves to kingdom come first. Well, if you took the time to read this, I hope you enjoyed a trip back in time. Thanks...old former Female Programmer :-)