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The most important development was that new computers were coming out almost every year or two, rendering existing ones obsolete. Software people had to rewrite all their programs to run on these new machines. Programmers did not have computers on their desks and had to go to the "machine room". Jobs were run by signing up for machine time or by operational staff. Jobs were run by putting punched cards for input into the machine's card reader and waiting for results to come back on the printer. The field was so new that the idea of management by schedule was non-existent. Making predictions of a project's completion date was almost impossible. Computer hardware was application-specific. Scientific and business tasks needed different machines. Due to the need to frequently translate old software to meet the needs of new machines, high-order languages like FORTRAN, COBOL, and ALGOL were developed. Hardware vendors gave away systems software for free as hardware could not be sold without software. A few companies sold the service of building custom software but no software companies were selling packaged software. The notion of reuse flourished. As software was free, user organizations commonly gave it away. Groups like IBM's scientific user group SHARE offered catalogs of reusable components. Academia did not yet teach the principles of computer science. Modular programming and data abstraction were already being used in programming. |
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