I don’t know about other people, but back in the early 80s, I spent a lot of time writing code (mostly assembler, some BASIC and other dead languages) with pencil on paper for various reasons: sometimes I preferred it, sometimes I was writing code for computers I only had access to in labs or at school.
There were even pre-made paper forms for writing code, like the IBM COBOL program sheets and similar for assembler.
Even now, if I’m working on a tough issue, I still print out code sections on paper and hash it out with a pencil.
Yup. All the way up to my second year of college ('85), I'd very carefully plan and write code by hand -- either in BASIC or 6502 assembly -- edit it and "test" it on paper, all so when I got a period at school or 15 minutes for $0.25 at the local library I could make the most of the time at the keyboard.
I will never forget the thrill of keying in a moderately-sized program I'd hand-coded -- a few hundred lines probably -- running it, fixing one or two typos, and then having the program just work. I'm sure they had bugs, but the fact was all that hand-coding effort paid off as programs that ran successfully on the first try.
[−]tonyedgecombe · 2026-11-15 Sun 09:43 UTC ·
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We did that at school. We would hand write Fortran code on sheets and send it off somewhere. A week to two later we would get the results back. I seem to remember most of the mistakes were when the operator entered the code.
There were even pre-made paper forms for writing code, like the IBM COBOL program sheets and similar for assembler.
Even now, if I’m working on a tough issue, I still print out code sections on paper and hash it out with a pencil.
I will never forget the thrill of keying in a moderately-sized program I'd hand-coded -- a few hundred lines probably -- running it, fixing one or two typos, and then having the program just work. I'm sure they had bugs, but the fact was all that hand-coding effort paid off as programs that ran successfully on the first try.