How To Code, 1960s Style

Pen, paper and the three-strikes rule 

In 1969, my dad got a job as a programmer for Kodak in their London headquarters. Here’s his account of coding in the era of Beatlemania and the space race, as best as I can remember it.

As one of the programming men (they were all men), you went to the engineers’ request tray and selected one of the problems that needed to be turned into a program. A simple problem might require three hundred lines of code, a more complex one would need over a thousand. As a junior programmer, you start on the smaller end.

Next, you devised a solution and drew out your program as a flow chart on a piece of paper. Every decision was marked out as a juncture, connecting all possible inputs to outputs.

You then designed different test inputs. With coloured pens, you demonstrated how each input would flow through the various decision paths of your program, and you detailed what the expected output would be. You did this so that every single part of the program was exercised.

Once complete, your code was transcribed into punch cards by a room filed with young women hammering on noisy machines. They worked in pairs. The first girl would type your code, punching holes into a card. The second would take the card and repeat these actions on a machine that didn’t punch holes, but checked they were where they were supposed to be. Each card took one single line of code, so a large program could take up several large boxes of cards.

The stack of cards were taken to the computer, a huge machine somewhere in the building. Once the program was loaded using the cards, your test inputs would be fed into the machine. If the results did not match the outputs you predicted, the code was rejected.

The first time your code failed, were told to buck up. The second time were given a stern dressing down. If your code did not work on the third run, you could be sent packing.

That bears repeating for anyone who’s had a try at programming: in 1969, you had just three attempts to perfect your code, and you did it all on paper. How many of us could manage that today?

My pops worked as a programmer for Kodak for nine months. In that whole, time he never saw a computer.