During my final year of high school in 1978, I took a newly created "computer programming" course along with half a dozen other adventurous souls.

The computers consisted of some very elaborate layered poster-board devices, which operated with sliding bits and rotating paper wheels. I have now forgotten what they were called, but wish that they had allowed us to keep them afterwards.

They were truly ingenious devices that showed how computers work at the micro-code level. Most "instructions" took perhaps four or five hand operations ("cycles") to "execute".

After a few months of machine code on these, we were shown how to program in FORTRAN, and made twice-weekly trips to a nearby university campus to use the punch card terminals and readers to have the programs executed on a remote IBM mainframe in another city, with the results banging away on a local (remote) line-printer. Yes, a real "line" printer. Bang, bang, bang.. each single "bang" producing a full line of output.

While everyone else in the group competed for the punch card stations, I noticed two massively oversized things that looked like IBM Selectric typewriters, except somebody had pasted little greek symbol labels all over the keys. These turned out to be APL (A Programming Language) workstations, and warped my view of computer programming forever.

Later, when I attended that same University, they put me in charge of "modernizing" the computer room, helping configure and program a new DEC computer, printer, and terminals. But the two APL teletypewriters (tty's) remained there long after I left.

Good fun!