It is fascinating that you worked with these ancient machines. Just thinking of having to write machine code directly is so much out of my experience - the first computers I encountered was accessible via Basic, but I remember that we were taught about the heroics of machine-code in the voluntary computer-science course I attended in school. It was just me and a few other male nerds and the language we programmed in was Comal80, a programming language that was developed by two Danes which was probably why it was the main language that was taught at the time in the Dansih school system.