In my first software job, you had to write your code on paper forms with a pencil, and take it down to the punch card girls. It would then be turned into a card deck, run overnight and next morning you'd have a huge pile of paper on your desk because your program had core dumped. Rinse and repeat.
When I first started working as a computer operator, in what was then called Data Processing, in the late 1970s the smaller IBM S/370 mainframes (the 115 and 125 models only, I think) had their IPL microcode on 12" floppy disks. You always needed to have a spare in case the one you usually IPLed from had a read error. There was a small cupboard thing under the CPU console printer where the floppy drive was located.
Carole
