I was lucky. There was an extension computing center in the basement of my dorm at Case (not CWRU then) in '67 with keypunches, and a window with a reader and a printer maned by a bored student. I could pad down there in my jammies at 2 a.m. to do my homework. As I recall I was an expert at duplicating a punched card just past the character I was trying to correct.
Then:
Hand soldered a mole of connections to build a Digital Group Z80 (bus but not S100) with 2K memory and computer controlled cassette tape drives. Programmed Z80 assembler
Commodore 64.? Programmed basic and 6502 assembler
Commodore Amiga: bitmapped graphics, multiwindow multitasking UNIX like OS. Programmed Fortran and FORTH, wrote a programming column for AMIGA Project magazine. The AMIGA had a modern file system, visual editor, symbolic debugger and optimizer for FORTRAN. At work I had an IBM dumb tube and a user hostile programming environment (JCL, no tools).? I wrote a transient coupled heat transfer and chemical reaction FEA code for process optimization at home and convected it to work. With the help of a plant db expert the optimizer was hidden under a simple interface for cure press operators. First deployed in '86, it's still in use in plants.
After that I convinced management to acquire some SUN workstations. That's when I started getting Jack's books that are still on my bookshelf and recently used.
Bob Benedict, KD8CGH