My first programming class was in high school in 1980. The teacher, Mr. Schultz, invented a pared-down, abstract assembly language he called SIMPLE (Schultz's Imaginary Machine Programming Language for Everyone). We spent the first month of class writing out solutions to programming problems in SIMPLE on paper before we ever touched a computer. And even then, we only had the one machine, so we had to take turns on it. We coded our BASIC programs on paper and checked them as thoroughly as we could to maximize the effectiveness of our precious time with the actual hardware.