Here's a souvenir I've kept from my first full year being paid to develop software.



It's not punch card programming, but it lets me show most of my co-workers just how truly old I really am. The crude dot-matrix printed label is the way it came from Microsoft. I'm responsible for the tear. My first professional programming gig was porting my company's flagship product from OS/2 to Windows 3.0. They entrusted this job to the rookie because they were certain that OS/2 was the future and Windows probably wouldn't take off. They're not in business anymore.

[MENTION=113466]steelbikeguy[/MENTION] mentioned HP calculators. I had an HP 20S in college. In theory, I still have it, but it's at the office and I haven't been there in six months and may not be for another year. One of my worst experiences with technology was the day I forgot to bring my calculator to a calculus test. A friend finished early and gave me his HP something or other to finish the test. It was one of the models that used RPN, and I had never been exposed to that hellish input method before. It took about three minutes to decide I could work out the arithmetic faster by hand.