You’re complaining about a slow laptop?

Laptops didn’t exist when I learned to code. Or personal computers at all for that matter.

When I went to grad school for my MSCS degree, all of our assignments ran on a UNIVAC 1108 mainframe computer — which had a 1.33 MHz processor, and about 1 MB of main memory. Or about 1000 times slower and 8000 times smaller memory than a cheap laptop. And cost over two millions dollars (almost $14 million today).

But the speed and memory size weren’t directly relevant to me, because there weren’t any dial up terminals yet (those were added the year I graduated). When they did come along, the normal speed was 300 baud. That’s about two seconds per line displayed on a screen.

All of our programs were submitted on punch cards in boxes like this:

and we would get the results back in a few hours, or more often, the next day.

Compile error? Too bad. Wait another day.

Yet I learned FORTRAN IV, UNIVAC 1108 assembler, LISP, COBOL and ALGOL 68 this way. I got my Master’s degree in Computer Science and am still working full-time 50 years later as a programmer at the age of 74.

Over the years I’ve picked up another dozen or so high-level languages, and 15 additional variations of assembler.

Please don’t expect me to shed any tears over your slow laptop.

   -Tom Crosley,M.S. in Computer Science, Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago