20 years? not long! I started by writing a program in hexadecimal to analyze some physics data I had taken on a Bendix G-15 computer whose memory was a rotating magnetic drum, and I am not talking about a current hard drive! (Now I sometimes find that html seems like hexadecimal seemed then.)
Then I remember when it was a great advance in the late 60's to use a PDP7 or 9 for data taking and analysis, partly because it was so cheap to double the memory: i.e., a 16 KB memory module only cost $5000! And you wouldn't believe the number of analytical options that would fit into 16 KB!
Tony