In the early 1950s computers filled large rooms, consumed enormous quantities of power, broke down regularly and came without any software at all. Programming was initially in absolute machine code, memory was extremely limited and I/O was rudimentary. Virtually every program presented some novel, intellectual challenge. The author's own programming experience began on the Manchester Mark 1 machine and continued via the IBM 704 to the Univac 1103A, by which time (1958) Fortran and the operating systems had arrived, machines were much smaller, were far more reliable and had ‘enormous’ memories of up to 32K words. In this article the characteristics of these early machines and the joys and pains of programming them are described.