Hello Danny and Luther,
That makes three of us who started with punch cards.
A bizarre as it might seem, I think punch cards were a beneficial way to learn to program. I spent so much more time thinking about the program and doing thoughtful debugging because submission of a job was so painful. I confess that I often do debugging now with less reflective thought because I can do dozens of haphazard experiments in minutes--this probably speeds the debugging process as often as it slows it down.
I was sold on symbolic computation (pre-wolfram-language) when I was able to solve classical mechanics homeworks faster and more accurately than my classmates. I remember that just being able to do a taylor expansion around a point and copy down the results and redraw crt-rendered plots into my homework felt like cheating.
I also remember my own "inertia" of switching from "symbolic-program-x" which was free at Berkeley (and had opaque syntax that I had learned moderately well) to Mathematica 1.
Craig
