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The Quest To Find the Longest-Serving Programmer (tnmoc.org)
In 2014, the National Museum of Computing published a blog post in which it tried to find the person who has been programming the longest. At the time, it declared Bill Williams, a 70-year old to be one of the world's most durable programmers, who claimed to have started coding for a living in 1969 and was still doing so at the time of publication. The post has been updated several times over the years, and over the weekend, the TNMC updated it once again. The newest contender is Terry Froggatt of Hampshire, who writes: I can beat claim of your 71-year-old by a couple of years, (although I can't compete with the likes of David Hartley). I wrote my first program for the Elliott 903 in September 1966. Now at the age of 73 I am still writing programs for the Elliott 903! I've just written a 903 program to calculate the Fibonacci numbers. And I've written quite a lot of programs in the years in between, some for the 903 but also a good many in Ada.
Didn't know this was a contest. Wrote my first professional code in the summer of 1968 at Kitt Peak National Observatory on a CDC 3200, and wrote my last program yesterday on a Mac (both in Fortran). My first "program" of sorts was on an analog computer kit that I helped put together in my 6th grade class in 1962.
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My father's been working for NASA since 1962 - I think his job then was on analog computers. His group did the flight certification of the Saturn V LVDC, and digital computers of the day couldn't keep up with hardware-in-the-loop simulation. They also simulated TLI after they reached orbit to make sure they would go to the Moon.
He's still there, working on the SLS guidance simulation these days.
I remember getting a Geniac "computer" for my birthday back around 1960 and figuring out the logic for different ideas and implementing them by putting these little brass contacts into the 3 pegboard wheels which you could turn by hand to set the states and make little light bulbs light up for output. I would have been around 8 years old then and it was just for fun and learning. At that time programming often consisted of jumpers on patch boards - around 1980 I was surprised when a medical equipment company I worked for doing R&D tossed out boxes of those patchboards with their programming jumpers still in place; when I asked they said that they were finally updating their computer and the new computer couldn't read the old patchboards! My dad worked at Western Electric and took me down a couple of times around 1960 and I remember playing tac-tac-toe on a computer they had there. Later, around 1968, a friend of mine had graduated from high school and went to college and we both spent time writing and punching decks of cards for Fortran programs which ran on the schools IBM 1130. I remember having to pre-process the decks because the machine only had something like 4K of memory and everything had to stripped and compressed to run. In college, around 1970, I remember submitting card decks with programs I had written at a window and coming back the next day to pick up a printout of my syntax errors. I didn't write anything professionally until later in the 1970 when the 8008 came out and I started doing assembly language work (actually doing the assembly work by hand and writing out and entering the hex opcodes, sometimes in binary on switches, usually for hardware drivers). I get some nostalgic feelings for those times but I wouldn't want to do it again!
I think this is what you're talking about: https://www.pcworld.com/articl...
I had one myself around the same time. The "red switches" were actually a slider that moved a number of contacts up and down. Depending on how you wired the contacts, they would act is AND, OR, XOR gates and you could put together simple logic functions like decoders, half adders, etc. The output was a number of light bulbs.
Is was as finicky as all hell and not all that well documented. I suspect the poor documentation was due to the fact there wasn't a lot of education depth in the tool - once you figured out how to wire the different gates, that was really all there was to it.
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