They were called teletype terminals IIRC, programs were written on sheets and input somewhere else.
There were some PCs (CCP/m mainly, msdos was the following year 1981).
Again looooong time ago!!
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The first computer I ever used in a paying job, in 1979, was the IBM 5110, which I wrote about here:
Before then I programmed with PL/1 and FORTRAN on an IBM System/360 mainframe, using stacks of punched cards created with this card punch machine:
At about the same time, I programmed with APL on a terminal (with monochrome monitor and dot-matrix printer) that was networked to the S/360 via IBM’s Time Sharing Option:
Even earlier, in 1975, I learned the fundamentals of programming with an HP-65 calculator (my father’s) and an HP-55 calculator (my own):
Jumping forward in time, the first computer I ever owned myself was the Olivetti M24, introduced in 1983:
I saved up my money to buy, a few months later, the Display Enhancement Board, which was extremely expensive:
Olivetti also sold a graphics enhancement board called the DEB - Display Enhancement Board. This provided up to 640 x 400 in 16 colours. Because the DEB was a separate board with its own output, you could run two monitors: a colour and a monochrome, side by side.
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There was no computers back when I was in school, we spent all our tech time trying to stay out of the principals office.
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Funny how i don’t remember ever using these in my school days?
nothing fancy way back when. I distinctly remember HS classes where we learned to write docs/print docs/save docs to dir with NO GUI, ENTIRELY IN DOS.
This was like learning Braille.
But when you compared how ugly and sluggish WIN GUI’s were back then, I grew comfortable in DOS and command line.
By the time I found Linux much later I was ready and comfortable to return to anything ‘terminal-centric’ for many tasks. Shout out to Endeavour 
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In high-school, we had a class dedicated to learning to touch type on electronic type writers. Might seem an unusual class, but that’d have to be one of the most valuable skills high-school taught me 
The stories of plugging away at manuals of code into the Commodore (VIC-20 in my case) so we could enjoy the hard earned but fleeting payoff of a few moving pixels across the old TV screen are relatable. It sounds tedious, and it was, but it’s a fond memory all the same. Talk about perseverance 
The imagination was rich in those early games too. Characters were essentially a few pixels, and environments conveyed more an idea of something, than anything even remotely realistic. There was a dungeon game where we had to move room to room, at risk of falling into a pit or meeting something that might have been a lion. Just blocks and pixels, but I remember being terrified of opening doors all the same 
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Morning all,
Woow this is so cool, I’m learning so much!
I do have one question/worry about
Now I’m not a whatever you call it, but even with the pc working the next day wouldn’t all that produce corrosion in time? Especially since I seriously doubt they were gold plating anything back then…
So whoever bought it would end up with a very nasty surprise a few years down the line? 
Maybe they were requisitioned by the Army in the War of 1812 
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I can’t even do this anymore (tease about age), because I live in a glass house haha.
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Perhaps the hardware was more sturdy in those days: i had just bought a new pc, when unpacking the machine and having just put the keyboard on my desk, i spilled a can of beer on it. I took the keyboard apart, cleaned all parts under the tap with lukewarm water, dried the parts, put them together again, and started using the keyboard.
I used that rig for a long time ever after…
Must have been before 1995
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I’m (very slightly) older than Unix, so I’m on dodgy ground too
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So you are sitting in a glass house? Then you should throw the first stone (maybe a few more if needed). And your escape is no big deal anymore. 
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I’m not sure these anecdotes are going to cast me in a good light but hey ho:
- Around 25 years ago I was employed as a senior consultant in a sizable IT company who looked after a lot of large customers in the insurance and banking sector. One customer was running out of file storage on the servers so obviously we recommended things such as archiving off data, or increasing the size of the storage but they were insistent there must be another way that didn’t cost time or money. So obviously I ended up telling them to change the default font size in Microsoft Word to 6pt (there standard was 12pt) and that 12 page document is now 6 pages… so obviously it uses less storage space
- Around the same time we were given the owners son of the IT company as a junior engineer (who was utterly useless and wasn’t really interested in working at all), so we sent him to his father to ask for a left-handed screwdriver. He never came back with a left-handed screwdriver, but did come back with a thick ear
- We also had a new engineer working on-site in a very large insurance underwriter and one of the team sent them to customer’s IT engineering manager to ask for a “long weight”, our engineer came back some time later to explain that he had waited 2 hours and after all that he never managed to get a “long weight”
I’d better stop as I’ve just realized I’m definitely not going to heaven.
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In junior high school, we learned BASIC on a dial-up TTY with a paper scroll for output and a paper tape hole puncher/reader to save programs. It was connected to the local college mainframe, and also featured a single-player Star Trek game. I used punch cards starting in high school. Guess I was naive, I never thought of hacking to change my grades or anything. 
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We were young and innocent. 
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I don’t think I changed my grades, but I do remember dataset diving in college and accessing my transcript and record.
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Oh well I can remember the time (many moons ago) that when you put in a new hard drive , you had to low level format it first using a debug command. There was no firmware on the drives back then, also you had to put certain information , like the number of cylinders, too get the drive recognized by the BIOS. Those where the (not so) good old days.
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I had about forgot about those days…yeah, life is so much easier now ;0
I remember that as well - and before the advent of HDD: to have a PC with 2 floppy drives (180kb per floppy IIRC), 1 with the word editor, 1 with the text files.
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Hahaha, cool, the only thing I have relating to that was a bit newer but when you still had to remember to change the jumper position on the back of the hdd’s pins to determine which was master and which where slaves! Them good old days… 
No worries mate, heaven is overrated, keep going, keep going. 