Hi! I even knew a computer with oil change! It was a Burroughs accounting/computing machine with a "high speed" printer. The print head was a metallic sphere (like a little ping pong ball) with all the characters, like some IBM typewriters. This sphere moved so fast that the mechanisms where embeded in an oil filled box...

Hi welcome
IF I remember it well followed by a band printer

Hi! I have nearly the same experience--first university machine was a CDC with a drum drive and card reader. I had the experience of having worked on cards at a lunch table--and sent peanut butter into the reader. I was really a good thing I finished my degree and left Michigan State expeditiously. But, those old times were exciting--we built a computer in a briefcase--It had 4 flipflops and 16t bytes of storage. It ran competitive games and collected results on paper punch tape. This was a year or so before Dec built the PDP-8.

Truism: Having coded in soldered-up machine code does not protect against making stupid Linux mistakes!

LHNitz

Ah, but did you do a college paper on magnetic core memory?

Welcome to LQ!!

I've been programming computers for 40 years.

In high school, I had so many source and binary "files" stored only on paper tape that I learned to sight read paper tape. I could understand the full machine language of a program just looking at the paper tape it was loaded from. I could also read source code on paper tape almost as quickly as on paper.

Later, I programmed an obsolete PDP-7 and when the weakness of its instruction set interfered with what I was trying to do, I soldered a few extra transistors and a bunch of diodes into the CPU to add some convenient extra instructions to its machine language.