I did FORTRAN and COBOL on punch cards. Actually ended up learning Machine Language for a project in the Air Force. Likeyou, very tight code. No waste.
We now look at terabytes of hard drives for a couple of hundred dollars. The 10Meg IBM at my university cost millions and took up an entire room.
Putting target coordinates and the flight program into my old Titan II ICBM guidance computer was amazing too. Now that I look back at that it amazes me how we could put the bomb on target with such primitive systems. I still have the wiring and other diagrams for that system and see how efficient we were at coding those things. Now days the programmers throw around a few megs here and there like it is nothing.
Sounds like you had some great experience.