James Drogan

From Wired Top Stories this morning comes April 7, 1964: IBM Bets Big on System/360.  I was taken back to my early years as a systems engineer for IBM in St. Louis.  Carrying around the famous "green card," writing S/360 Assembler Language on coding sheets, doing the desk checks, punching the cards, getting up and leaving the family for 2AM test shots in downtown St. Louis. 

 
We emptied bit buckets and hexadecimal become our second language.  Writing two-card self-loading programs that would actually do something useful.  Changing the program status words and patching memory locations from the console  in order to make the program do something a bit different or to correct an errant instruction without going back through punching a a correct card and recompiling.

Heady times.