I met my first formal computer in the late 60s.. IBM .. Punch cards.. Fortran. Hated it. HP had a neat gadget out about than too. It printed to foil paper..OOooo..
Fortran. I hated that during my masters program. Was an engineer who started with a slide rule in the late 50’s. Then management want me to learn punched tape to program milling machines in the mid 60’s. G code? No thanks. Then onto VAX. Etc.
Not sure why I was tasked with that crap, as I was never good at programming anything. But I got the job done anyway.
My first was from Radio Shack. You had to write your own code in basic, if, then, goto. I used it to set up an inventory management system for my a/c and electrical business. Inventory levels for rough-in and trim-out materials were critical as balanced against cash flow.
That primitive little machine was a huge time saver. It generated a reorder list, indicated troublesome back orders, tracked usage and took me a bunch of time with inputs. Bar code scanners, what a concept. The leaps forward are mind blowing in my lifetime!