“In my old life,” said Wicked, “when I was a student, I used to program computers with them.” Because that’s how they did it back in the days when computers filled rooms and the Lunar Lander touched down using hardware less powerful than my mum’s thermostat. Wicked used to write his program out by hand and then use a machine that translated the instructions into lots of holes in lots of cards which were then literally “compiled” and fed into an optical reader.
