In 1962, after leaving the Navy and attending summer school at the University of Iowa, I qualified for a new and federally-subsidized school to teach data processing (computers and such). I became part of the very first class of Iowa Technical Education Center (Iowa Tech), moved to Ottumwa, Iowa and rented an apartment with 3 other young male students. The school recieved much press publicity, billed often as the "College in a Cornfield", but it was a splendid and intense full-year program that prepared 20 of us well for a career in the new and thriving computer industry.

In case you didn't notice, the crew-cut dude with the little paunch, next to the attractive young woman, in the small photo, is yours truly, Bob Smith. Below is a large version. The young woman, Judith Barnett, the only woman in the first class, later became my first wife.

The computer installed for school use was a B-280 model, manufactured by the Burroughs Corporation (now part of Unisys). Computers were so expensive and apt to require service that ours came with a resident company full-time engineer, who essentially became part of the school.

Among many other things, we learned how to write programs for the B-280. Once planned, a program was literally "written" on coding sheets, as below, and then keypunched into cards, which were then input into the card reader of the B-280, and assembled into a runable program.

As part of the assembly process, a printout of the assembled program was produced.
Shown below is a sample printout.

After leaving Iowa Tech, I never worked writing programs for the B-280, but programmed for IBM computers for a number of years. Programming languages tend to be similar enough so that after having learned one or two, learning new ones is easier.

A note of interest about Iowa Tech: Within a year or so after my stint there, a young Lakota man from South Dakota took the same course, worked for a while with computers, and then became well known as an activist leader for the American Indian Movement, and later as an actor. His name is Russell Means. We met a few years ago, discussed Iowa Tech (and libertarianism) and found that we're almost exactly the same age.