Mr Deng's IT News Collection: This is an IBM coding sheet, for COBOL. We had them for other languages, too: Pascal, Assembly language, Fortran. You'd use these to hand-write your computer programs. In pencil. Because this was the dizzying heights of "undo" technology: And when you were finished handwriting a section of code - perhaps a full program, perhaps a subroutine - you'd gather these sheets together (carefully numbered in sequence, of course) and send them along to the folks in the data entry department. They'd type it in. And the next day you'd get a report to find out if it compiled or not.

01 May, 2014

This is an IBM coding sheet, for COBOL. We had them for other languages, too: Pascal, Assembly language, Fortran. You'd use these to hand-write your computer programs. In pencil. Because this was the dizzying heights of "undo" technology: And when you were finished handwriting a section of code - perhaps a full program, perhaps a subroutine - you'd gather these sheets together (carefully numbered in sequence, of course) and send them along to the folks in the data entry department. They'd type it in. And the next day you'd get a report to find out if it compiled or not.

http://simonallardice.com/general/2014/03/17/first-computer.html