I think I first started writing computer programs in year 9 high school. Back then the South Australia education department had a single computer facility for students at a place called Angle Park Computing Centre. You wrote your program on Optical Recognition Cards (OCR) which were sort of like punch cards except you used a marking texta to indicate each virtual punch hole.

I’ve just discovered a dozen or so of these OCR cards because I’d saved them for circuit diagrams written on the other side before the days of note paper. It appears the computer language was a form of BASIC – Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, and there was one card per programming line. It would take dozens of cards to write the simplest of programs. You bundled your stack of cards together in a deck, gave them to the teacher, they’d be sent down to the Computing Centre across town, then a week later you’d get back a printout. Generally the program hadn’t “run” because of some “typo” error, so it took weeks and weeks to get even a simple program to run. We learnt to submit multiple decks each week to maximize the chances of something working. A form of multitasking?

Hilo was a favorite program. The computer generated a random number between 1 & 100. You had to guess the number in the least number of steps. A program like this would take a lot of OCR cards!

There was an Computing Centre summer school you could attend and I discovered the center had a couple of interactive teletypes (electric typewriters) hooked up to the mainframe computer so you could type in the program and get more instant gratification. Of course these were hogged by the older computer geeks.

I’ve decoded one of the OCR cards. I must have had better eye sight back then. It assigns a string ‘RED’ to a variable G$. Wildly exciting.