A blast from the past! An IBM 1620 was the very first computer I programmed, way back in 1969, likely a model 2. As part of a second year Applied Mathematics semester we were given a block of coding forms, a McCracken book on FORTRAN II and a list of problems to solve. There was no instruction on how to do this beyond reading the book, as far as I can remember. Someone punched cards from our coding forms and put them into the machine. We never actually got to touch the hardware, but we could look at it through glass windows.

That was a life-changing experience as it led to me dropping out of my Physics degree and eventually going into a computing career.

Paul Kimpel has built a lovely web-based IBM 1620 emulator, and was able to compile and run a 1963 IPL-V compiler and runtime from U Oregon. Run it all from your browser! Execution details and project history linked from Paul’s repo: https://github.com/pkimpel/retro-1620