On Monday, 3 September 2018 at 02:58:01 UTC, Nick Sabalausky
(Abscissa) wrote:
In the 50's/60's in particular, I imagine a much larger
percentage of programmers probably had either some formal
engineering background or something equally strong.
I guess some had, but my impression it that it was a rather mixed
group (probably quite a few from physics since they got to use
computers for calculations).
I have heard that some hired people with a music background as
musicians understood the basic algorithmic ideas of instructions
and loops. I.e. how to read and write instructions to be followed
(sheet-music).
Programming by punching in numbers was pretty tedious too... so
you would want someone veeeery patient.
