You lucky person , to have steam , incredible ...   :)

I started on NCR criterion mainframes , complete with card readers , and the old style monster tape decks . Most batch jobs were card deck, for the job, tape input and output with a very few master files on removable disk platters , about 20 pounds weight for I think about 200 megs of storage .  Disk controllers were about 5 x 4 x 4 feet big and were booted off cassette tape . Onsite engineer to keep things running .

Then the site went to IBM s/36 with 60 meg hard disk and S/38 with a IBM mainframe. Actual disk units.  Changed to AS/400 eventually .

Makes me feel ancient when people start complaining about the render times of the desktop PC, more powerful than the old mainframes. I sometimes wish everyone had to make 10 pictures on an old processor with Povray. Render times measured in days or weeks .  You mention that there were no pc's when you were in high school and they start to look at you oddly. 

If you dont have it get the documentation from www.python.org.   Poser python supports a lot of it. The folder and file management and file access all work .
the modules OS, shutil and string are all useful.