Memories: First exposure to computers

Perhaps my first program was an attempt to calculate , suggested by one of my teachers, using the formula. Software included some sort of rudimentary operating system, a BASIC-like programming language called FOCAL-8 and minimal versions of Fortran and LISP. The luxurious MACRO-8 assembly language was also available. Every day, letters went out: for the new customers, a welcome letter including tear-off coupons for each instalment, showing the amount, account number and due date. Although the business language RPG was available and was probably much more suitable, the programmers at ICDC had decided to hack the Fortran system so that REAL numbers were actually 32-bit integers, since you can't use floating-point for accounting purposes. Without going into details, let's just say the programming environment was delicate. To run a program, you had to mount a tape holding its object code along with other tapes for its inputs and outputs. Just about every program they ran was a simple loop and performed essentially a database query, reading successive records from the master file and for some of them, doing a basic action such as printing a letter.