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Just been drawing some flowcharts for my next blog post. Was using draw.io which is fine, but it’s no Helix Computer Flowchart Template.

One word: punch cards.

Haha! Indeed. I am just old enough to have caught the tail end of those and paper tape. I did my A levels on a PDP11 but we had terminal access. The college still had a handful of teletypes in operation to complement the VDU terminals.

Luckily I only had a 1 hour class that involved feeding punch cards to the operator's window. Next class required line editing on an LA120 Decwriter if I didn't get a CRT. First job involved an 11/70 (RSX-11M+) and the fancy amber (text) terminals. We've come a long way!