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Manual programming felt like real craft, not just pushing buttons.
I learned on machines where you wrote every line by hand. Now, with CAD/CAM, operators just load files and hit start. Some say it's progress, but I think we lost a deep understanding of the code. When a program fails, the new guys struggle to fix it without that base knowledge. My old mentor could debug a job by reading the tape, and that skill saved us more than once.
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daniel_carter6mo ago
Seriously, your mentor fixed code just by reading the paper tape?
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laurak836mo ago
Old COBOL programmers could read punch cards like text.
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henryr456mo ago
That's just how people get with any system they use all day. My grandma reads upside-down nutrition labels from across the kitchen now. You see it with cashiers who know barcodes by sight, or guys who can tell engine issues just by the sound. We're all just pattern-matching animals, and old tools wire your brain in weird ways. Our brains are pretty good at turning nonsense into something you can just...read.
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hernandez.gavin6mo ago
My buddy's dad could read a whole card deck in one pass.
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