I learned FORTRAN 66 (or FORTRAN 4 - can't quite remember) in 1975 when I was 36 years old. The class was offered by the School of Business and run on a CDC 6500 60 bit computer. Input was punch cards ander the cycle was: punch the cards for code being really careful to keep them in order; sandwich the cards between the CDC control language cards, wrap with rubber bands and drop in an input window; after 45 minutes to a couple of hours time later start checking for output consisting of the printer output wrapped around the cards; correct errors; and repeat the cycle.

I learned quite quickly that the lab was almost empty at 10 PM so I got in the habit of doing my homework at night. I made friends with the operator and learned how to operate the machine which had 5 MB disk drives that were larger than my washing machine. IIRC it had 64 MB of memory and that 32 MB were available to the user. The printers were really, really fast and someone had wired a speaker to some part of the CPU so one could differentiate sounds and sometimes discern what tasks it was doing.

Later that semester a time sharing system was set up and I switched to using a teletype for input and then used it for class but the FORTRAN was a little different, I taught myself BASIC at that time as well.

One other thing I remembered was that most of the students, I think they were actually in the School of Business, had a really hard time 'getting it'. I used to compose my homework while the instructor was answering their questions.

It was 'spaghetti' programming at its worst.

Circular runways have been discussed in two posts on Quora (www.quora.com) which have yet to be merged.

Nah, according to the text of the article it's powering neither the State of Hawaii nor the Island of Hawaii but provide some of the power to Kauai which will reduce its use of oil.

Burn dinosaurs? Oh, you mean oil that's made from dinosaurs. Yeah, we all know dinosaurs trekked to dying places before they kicked off just like elephants in more modern times, Took me a minute (no coffee, yet). I get it now, Mr. Sinclair.

Yes, but there could be pole dancing!

If it's like their previous attempts at CAPTCHA-less CAPTCHAs this will involve taking information like mouse movements and your browser fingerprint, and then analyzing that to decide if you're human. Deeply concerning. Google already knows enough about my browsing habits by having their scripts embedded everywhere.

Pizzagate isn't fake news, it's a conspiracy theory, meaning that this is fake news. I haven't seen any news outlets do anything but discredit the theory and call the people who believe it lunatics.

Why would anybody mod this up? It's nothing but a "NO U", and if you even watched 30 seconds of the video you'd see it's a black guy...

I remember hearing about something like this a year ago.
It gets worse, your friend's scores affect your score, meaning that people with low scores will become shunned and isolated.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Why is a space considered a symbol but a letter or a 'number' is not? Is an emoticon a symbol?

I missed an opportunity to learn coding in 1961 as the computer was 30 miles from campus, I had no car, and was taking semester hours of math and physics. Then I was accepted for graduate school in 1975 and decided that since my goal was to become involved with science and research I should acquire skills to handle data and signed up for FORTRAN.

FORTRAN was offered by the Business department and 'goto' was heavily used. It appeared that only two or three of us in the class of about 30 'got it' but I might have been biased since I was 10 years older than most. Debugging was a bitch. Once the code was key punched the packet of cards was placed in a container embedded in a wall; at some point the computer operator would run the packet through the CDC 6000 series main frame (60 bit words) and then the output wrapped around the card deck and put in a pick-up pile a few hours later. All this to find syntax errors! I wound up doing my coding from 9pm or so until 2am as wait times were substantially shorter. I made friends with the operator and learned how to run the main frame.

About this time a time sharing system using Teletype Model 33 ASR terminals distributed around the science building was installed so I started to use it for my FORTRAN class (slightly different than the CDC) and learned BASIC.

I was given a 6502 computer on a board designed for engineers could learn how to use the 6502 chip and I/O chips. Input was a keyboard, output a paper tape similar to a cash register tape. I learned some assembly on it but had to purchase a couple of tape decks and build an interface to save and load code in the 'Kansas City Format'. I wrote a version of Wumpas using the included BASIC in ROM and used this computer in a data structures class I took.

I did take introductory courses in Pascal and C, for instance, but was self taught in C++ and in the last 4 years Java and Dart.

I read all I could to understand what to do to conceptualize and then start to code projects. Since most the coding I've done is in support of data acquisition and converting raw data into data usable for analysis and display I find that I kind of cherry-pick topics to learn, skip others, and have spotty knowledge of some aspects of the languages I use.

Programming has mostly been a secondary task in my job descriptions. I think requiring primary school students to learn coding is about as sensible as requiring them to take calculus in order to be accepted in University for Humanities majors.

Including the 'needles' made of plant spines other sharp objects. Without this we wouldn't have been able to stitch pelts together to make clothing and clothing allowed us to live in nearly every environment.

My list also includes the knife. Early ones were made from stone, such as flint, by striking the flint with another stone shaping it into a hand held gadget with a cutting edge. It's the direct ancestor of my pocket knife. It provided a simple tool that was used to shape things such as pelts, branches, etc. Must be older than the needle.

Last, but definitely least, I'd say the fire kit which would consist of a stick of hardwood that could be made to rotate fast using the hands or a small bow onto a softer wood. Friction would create hot wood power that was used to start fires. Fire gave access to food which needed to be cooked such as roots and tubers and food which was better cooked such as meat. Our ancestors also used fire to manipulate their environment to their benefit.

Most of the gadgets in the article are not available to many or most of the earth's population but a cutting gadget, sewing gadget, and control of fire shaped provided for our species survival.