… And, we have a winner!
I never actually had to toggle in a program.
And you had to bring coal for the school stove so your hands wouldn’t freeze writing on the slate?
Interesting. The reason I had asked is that about a year ago I made the opposite move. I was running HA in docker on a VM and moved it to a Pi 4 “temporarily” while doing a server upgrade. I actually never moved it back because I didn’t see any performance difference.
I am booting on a USB so I don’t get any SD card issues which seems to be most Pi users primary complaint.
That was the other feature set of our school computer. If it needed an OS reload you had to use a hex keypad on the front to bootstrap it, then load the OS from the home made card reader. This consisted of sliding cards down an incline so they passed over a set of sensors at exactly the right speed. Send it down at the wrong speed, or in the wrong order, you start again, right from the bootstrapping.
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Ok. Any of you ever touch a drum computer? Main memory was on the drum. It had an optimizing assembler. Based on how long an instruction took, it would place the next instruction at an address on the drum that would be just ready to read when the current one finished. Every instruction included the address of the next. Didn’t need any jump opcodes. Can’t claim to have done much with it but my college had one that I briefly played with.
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Googling that just gives me synth machines 
Fortran with punch cards on a PDP11 for me
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we had got to the point of being able to do fortran from a terminal at Uni, I don’t think I ever did a punch card in that environment.
Tried to do some text handling in fortran. Those engineers, mathematicians and physicists didn’t really do real language 
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Google RPC-4000. It was a relative of an LPG 30. Think it was originally built in late 50s or early 60s. I saw it around 1968.
Ahhh, Fortran. I took one class on it. As I recall the final project was a pretty complex program. Never touched it again until many years later when the engineering department bought a mainframe application which didn’t have an interface to our security system. (Anyone else run ACF2?) I hated multiple logons, so I dusted off the old text book and wrote the integration. One side assembler and one side Fortran. I think the vendor flew me across the country for a week to give a presentation about it at a conference (remember conferences?)
as well as fortran, APL on a terminal… dunno how widespread that language was though…
Was APL the one with weird characters that were an integral part of the language?
Possibly Stands for A Programming Language. Never heard of it before or since
Example APL code from wikipedia
x[⍋x←6?40]
and people say yaml is hard!
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Well, just look at you all becoming friends! 
Seriously though, nice to see a move away from all the negativity even though it’s a little off topic.
My world started with 286 computers and Commodores (with tape drives). Our school’s computers booted from 5.25’’ floppy disks (no hard drives). My life’s mission was to draw things in LOGO (I was 11) and reverse engineer games written in GWBasic. Later, the first network I worked on was a BNC style coax ring network. Drums and punch cards precedes me, but I have written things in (x86) assembler and written a compiler. Programmed FPGAs, designed and built analogue and digital circuits (not commercially though). Once hunted down a bug in LAPACK (famous linear algebra Fortran lib still widely used), but I didn’t know the math. Anyway, these things can be tremendous fun, but also frustrating. It is great to be able to build software quickly in modern languages. In the end, it’s horses for courses and all those old skills are still necessary.
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Oh, I remember this computer “fondly”. We had to toggle the tape loader with a toggle. I did it so often I did it from memory and could boot the tape loader in 10 to 15 seconds.
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Slate?! We weren’t fancy enough for that. We had to make do writing on the floor!
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Floor??? You were lucky to have a floor…
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My thoughts exactly. Maybe that’s what this forum needs. To humanize each other a bit, instead of pigeon-holing everyone as a dev, mod or dumb end-user. We all bring something to the table. When someone says something that gets under our skin, we need to step back and try to understand what they’re trying to say, instead of firing back a snarky retort. I know I’m going to work harder at that.
Back to the humor:
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Macro-32 on Vax/VMS.
Now there was an instruction set architecture that laughed in the face of the Load / Store model
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