my dad was involved in developing core memory back when computers were the size of your house with glowing valves, for Mullard who own Philips, we were brought up on binary as kids so a bit of exaggeration, I went to uni in '69 to study maths, physics & computer science starting with machine code on a PDP-11 the size of a snooker table, graduating to Fortran where we had to punch our own cards for the main London Uni computer to run overnight and the results came back next morning on that green striped paper. When I graduated I started writing parameters for mainframe bureau business systems and went on to sell, install and support business systems on the first small-business PC's through the late 70's to mid-80's, everything then was text based until Apple came along with their GUI and people started poking at pictograms. I felt you could never get the same depth of nuance from a pictogram than a written instruction and I got out of supply and into operation, I'd sold and installed so many accounting based systems it was easy to get qualified and I spent the next 20 years as a company accountant with a handful of private clients. Finally had enough 5 years ago at 65 and retired. So really the same as you if my dad's early efforts are discounted, from '69! Nice to hear from you, so few people remember those days at the sharp end!
