Sequoia 15.4 : Setting a custom desktop color does not work

There was an elegance to that because people had to be VERY careful with memory allocation and such since resources were very constrained by the hardware.

Hearing my father talk about writing his Chemistry PhD dissertation (chemical analysis of Lanthanide/rare earth metals) and having to write the code himself on paper tape on an IBM 7094 mainframe in about 1961 was fascinating. He had to learn to program to do this.

Learning to program led him to take a job managing a mainframe data center at Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) and that's where I grew up. He taught CS for 35 years because he had to learn this all himself.

That said, I met someone in the late 90s who had had him for an intro to CS course in about 1982. She remembered him (he's a tiny man but a rather memorable personality) but hated punch cards!

Mike Friedman wrote:

There was an elegance to that because people had to be VERY careful with memory allocation and such since resources were very constrained by the hardware.

True enough. Of course there is a huge difference in coding for computers that could only hold 16K characters and dealing with modern operating systems. I read somewhere some version of macOS had 40 million lines of code. Not something I would want to deal with. It still amazes me macOS is as bug free as it is.

One of my wife's first jobs was for a data firm sitting at a keyboard creating the punch cards. Her only real complaint was you didn't dare drop a stack, or you'd have to put them all in order again. They were numbered so you could do it, no matter how jumbled they had gotten. But still far from fun.

Read the post above yours.

+1 Indeed. I'm glad you said something. I had to bite my tongue.