Beginnings III.

Learning without practicing and experimenting is not much fun. So I left Fortran and started with Basic because from time to time I could lend home computer Sinclair ZX Spectrum from my friend and try programming on it. It was better, but it was only for limited time.
I was studying on the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University in Prague at this time. There we had a big computer hidden somewhere in one of the buildings of faculty. We were typing the code of our programs on "programming cards" (1 card = 1 row of source code), gave them to the queue for processing and waited for the output (printed on many papers). I remember that one time I forgot to discard ONE card with wrong code and after 2 days I obtained output - listing of source code with one wrong code, so it couldn't be compiled. :-( I threw off the wrong card and waited another 2 days for output. The result was that we were more careful about the cope we were programming and typing.
We were programming in PL/I (= Programming Language One). I didn't use it from then.

Beginnings II.

As we need to tell computers what they have to do, we need to communicate with them using language that they know - the programming language. In fact - computers know only one language - the machine code, but the smart people prepared tools for us, mere mortals, to be able to tell computers our wishes and commands in so called higher languages (e.g. Basic ;-) ).
I decided to start in the middle of these approaches and started to learn Fortran (partly looks like machine code, partly like Basic). That was in early eighties and I didn't have access to any computer, IBM compatible PC were just born and there were only first messages about home computers like Sinclair ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64. So I was learning programming in Fortran only theoretically. I don't know how successful I was, because I didn't compile any row of Fortran code. :-)