Relic? Hell, you're a youngster compared to me. I just celebrated my 45th anniversary as a programmer. I started in the days of coding pads (paper), keypunch cards, and three day turn around on assemblies (compiles to you youngsters) on machines with 16k characters (IBM 1401) or 160k characters (IBM 7080). COBOL was in the birthing stage and Fortran was only used for scientific applications where I was working so we still used machine language. John Backus and Peter Nauer (of BNF fame) were still wrestling with the notion of meta-languages and the great hope for the future was ALGOL then PL/1. Computers were massive beasts weighing several tons and required huge air conditioning systems to dissapate the heat. The primary storage medium was magnetic tape on 2400' reels. We had 24 drives on the IBM 7080. The first disk drive I used was an IBM 1405 RAMAC (second generation disk) with 10 million characters. It was 5' x 4' x 4', had two read/write heads (that's right 2 that moved up/down, in/out). Max seek time was over 2 seconds. Of course, the 1401 cycle times were measured in milliseconds! Everything was run in batch mode over night so we coded by day and were on-call every night to solve problems that might occur. I'm still an active programmer and I much prefer the development environment I have now. I have no desire to return to "the good old days".