Computing nostalgia

[DenGar]

Punch card emulator

[HansV]

That's a lot easier than when I was a student!

[PaulB]

Totally unrealistic! While the card stock color is almost right, I remember 5081s having rounded corners and always having the admonition: DO NOT FOLD, SPINDLE OR MUTILATE.

[BobH]

Totally unrealistic! While the card stock color is almost right, I remember 5081s having rounded corners and always having the admonition: DO NOT FOLD, SPINDLE OR MUTILATE.

That is my recollection, too, Paul!

Who can name the three zones on a punch card and explain what they were used for?

[DaveA]

Do a Google on Punch Card and then select images and you will find all kinds of them.
I recalled using many of them shown and a lot that were customized for the company and government uses.

[ChrisGreaves]

...the admonition: DO NOT FOLD, SPINDLE OR MUTILATE.

Another myth.
Exploded: That admonition was not aimed at the users but at the programmers.
There were a whole lot of other things we were not allowed to do to the punch operators when they mis-interpreted our coding forms.
Punching, too, was out of the question, IIRCC.

[ChrisGreaves]

Punch card emulator

Sigh!
Coincidence: This morning I sent off a message to an ICL newsletter:
Speaking of social networking, you know of course that Twitter has a 140-character limit. Did you know that the 1900 series had the SUSTY instruction with a limit of 40 characters. Taught about a trend-setter!

[PJ_in_FL]

True nostalgia! When programs were written by the pound (of punch cards) instead of the lines of code

[ChrisGreaves]

True nostalgia! When programs were written by the pound (of punch cards) instead of the lines of code

RichardDawkins: "An Appetite For Wonder" (“The Orchestra ...”)
In the mid 1960s (Dawkins relates) he used an English Electric KDF-9, “filling a large room”, writing in K-Autocode (similar to FORTRAN); The USA had Punched Cards, but the British used Paper Tape; Dawkins talks of 24-hour turnaround (Later he used a Elliot 803 – more primitive, but with all-night access.)

Luxury ! (to quote Monty Python) (thanks, Claude!)

At ICL’s SDC in Adelaide we never knew whether our (punched card) job deck would be run and returned in 5 minutes or two weeks. Should we start a major effort on our second-most important task, or wait ten minutes to see if we got lucky?
It wasn’t so much the media that worried us (card decks were sequenced and could be sorted, ...) but the terrible uncertainty, and, after a two-week wait, the knowledge that we could have taken a week off and flown home to Perth to visit the in-laws and show off the new baby.

[BobH]

When I was at university, I took an obligatory course in PL-1 programming. I never waited for the usual student result turnaround, though. Why? I worked in a computer room. Although we did not use PL-1 (autocoder in compatibility mode, COBOL, and BAL were our standards), the mainframe had FORTRAN and PL-1 compilers. I never punched by own code either. I wrote it out on coding sheets and the key punch operators punched and verified the cards for me as time allowed. I rarely got an error from cards punched incorrectly but got too many from bad logic and flow control in my code. I learned a lot from that exercise. Six months later I was moved from operations to programming where the company sent me to classes for COBOL and BAL.

[Rudi]

Bringing back the first computers: The world's greatest restoration projects

[ChrisGreaves]

Bringing back the first computers: The world's greatest restoration projects

Thanks Rudi; the photo alone was worth the Click!
Back in the late eighties I was instrumental (Rough Translation: A thorn in the side of a previous employer) in getting a 1401 shipped to the museum in Ottawa. Several years later I was able to stand in front of it in awe.
Owing to the presence of other mortals, I was inhibited from bowing down before it.
I still have a 1401 language manual. Makes for good bedtime reading.

[BobH]

That 1401 was my first machine back in '65. Those BCD switches on the front got me out of some tough binds occasionally. I wrote my first Autocoder program on and for that machine.

Hard to believe that machine is now 50 years old. Harder still to think about what 50 years before that meant.

Thanks for the link!

[ChrisGreaves]

... got me out of some tough binds occasionally.

For me is was the fact that I submitted a 2,000 card job and got back a white card with various 3-character death-throes addresses and switch light settings penciled in by the operators!

Pete Moss was puzzled over the fact that he got back as many blank (unpunched) cards as the data deck he submitted; a 1,000 compiled object deck and 1,000 data cards was returned as a 1,000 compiled object deck and 1,000 data cards PLUS 1,000 blank cards.

Turns out his badly-formed B for a Branch mnemonic had been punched and verified as a P.
Hence a Punch-and-branch!
Hah hah.
P.S. The operators already thought of Pete as weird, so they were saying nothing ...

[BobH]

Now THAT's FUNNY!

I don't care who you are, THAT'S FUNNY!

[HansV]

When I was a 2nd year student, we submitted the programs we wrote on 80-column punch cards. Only the first 72 columns were used for source code; the last 8 columns were ignored by the computer. We were strongly advised to punch the sequence number of the card within the program in those 8 columns and most of us did so diligently, at least for programs of more than 20 cards or so. But one of my fellow students couldn't be bothered to add sequence numbers. One day, he entered the room where we submitted the cards with a cardboard box containing a 1,500 card program. He tripped over a power cable on the floor and dropped the box, dispersing his 1,500 cards all over the floor. He wasn't amused at all when the rest of us started laughing...

[BobH]

Ah, the fate of those who ignore good advice . . .

Those of us of a certain age remember fondly the days of the 5081. (For those who don't know, that was the stock number for plain or otherwise un-embellished 80-column punched cards.) I still have most of a box of them.

I think I've told this story before, but I'm invoking the privileges of the village elder and repeating myself.

When I was at school about 50 years ago, I also ran night operations for a large bank. We captured the information from checks and deposits and posted to about half a million accounts each night. To facilitate the operation we also had about 10 keypunch machines and operators. I would code my instructions on forms designed for that purpose and have my keypunch operators punch them into cards then verify them (to detect typo's). Of course, they always included sequence numbers that increased by 5 on successive cards - so that I could add supplemental cards as the source deck evolved. Most students had to spend countless hours in the lab area waiting to get to use the limited number of keypunch machines. I was never seen in the lab and one of the students whispered in my instructor's ear as if I were cheating. After he was made aware of my night job, he relented. Later, I convinced my boss to let me compile my programs on the company mainframe. I got immediate and unlimited turnaround and therefore progressed through the assigned work much faster than did my classmates who had to submit their source card decks to the university computer operations and wait overnight to get back their results which inevitably had compilation errors. There were few advantages to working nights and taking classes during the day, but this situation was one perk I took full advantage of.

[DenGar]

2-states-of-every-programmer.jpg

[BobH]

The pic on the left is what they prefer the rest of the world to perceive them as.

The one on the right is too close to the truth.

[mishmish3000]

For me, it would have to be a cat...

no idea.jpg