Valentine’s Day and the dawning of the computer age

Laurie  Newell shared this.

“When I was at WSU, my boyfriend (now husband) made me a computer valentine and probably risked failing the class.

“This was in 1970, when computers were huge machines that took up whole rooms. Students wrote their programs on punch cards, turned them in and then picked up the printouts a couple hours or days later.

“Bob had programmed it to say ‘I love you Laurie’ enclosed in a large heart made of Xs. Then he buried it in 20-39 pages of random numbers called a core dump. Naturally, I was mystified to receive a pile of paper with a message from the TA written in red ink: ‘Is this a class project?’”