Back in the early days of computers, you would flowchart your program, write all of the machine instruction on numbered forms, then send the forms to keypunch, where they would punch the cards. You would get back a collated stack of cards, each one having 25 rows of 80 characters (this pattern was intentionally carried over to the DOS CRT screen, by the way). At any rate, you now have an ordered stack of punch cards containing your program, and if you dropped your stack and the cards got out of order, your program was toast.At any rate, I get this mental image of someone tripping while carrying a stack of old Bloom County comics to the scanner.
When I worked for Boeing Aerospace we’d make up a couple of trays of junk punch cards of the same color and mark them up like the real multi-tray program decks, then when the programmer came to get his ‘unsequenced’ program deck, we’d spill the phony trays on the floor. The programmers would go ballistic thinking they had to go through all those cards and get them back in sequence.
The first computer I learned to program was an SDS-910, a two-bay cabinet with a whopping 4K (that’s right, 4K) of core memory. Programs had to be well-designed to fit. When we had that memory doubled to 8K I thought I was in Heaven. To avoid the spilled cards problem, I would use a magic marker (or the equivalent) and draw a diagonal line on the top of the card deck. Then if they were spilled, you had a good starting point to sort them out.
When I was programming in high school (late 1960s), the board of education provided punch card services, even for students. It was a bit of shock to go to the University of Waterloo and discover that first year students (1970) had to do their own card punching.
When I started grad school (1961), we had a giant CONTROLDATA computer requiring data entry via teletype tape. By 1964, we had advanced (?) to punch cards.
Plumbob Wilson over 9 years ago
Back in the early days of computers, you would flowchart your program, write all of the machine instruction on numbered forms, then send the forms to keypunch, where they would punch the cards. You would get back a collated stack of cards, each one having 25 rows of 80 characters (this pattern was intentionally carried over to the DOS CRT screen, by the way). At any rate, you now have an ordered stack of punch cards containing your program, and if you dropped your stack and the cards got out of order, your program was toast.At any rate, I get this mental image of someone tripping while carrying a stack of old Bloom County comics to the scanner.
jones.knik over 9 years ago
When I worked for Boeing Aerospace we’d make up a couple of trays of junk punch cards of the same color and mark them up like the real multi-tray program decks, then when the programmer came to get his ‘unsequenced’ program deck, we’d spill the phony trays on the floor. The programmers would go ballistic thinking they had to go through all those cards and get them back in sequence.
lazydude41 over 9 years ago
The first computer I learned to program was an SDS-910, a two-bay cabinet with a whopping 4K (that’s right, 4K) of core memory. Programs had to be well-designed to fit. When we had that memory doubled to 8K I thought I was in Heaven. To avoid the spilled cards problem, I would use a magic marker (or the equivalent) and draw a diagonal line on the top of the card deck. Then if they were spilled, you had a good starting point to sort them out.
Dragoncat over 9 years ago
Doesn’t Opus look comfy…?
Olddog1 over 9 years ago
Plumbob. The last 5 columns were for numbering the cards. Sort 80, then sort 79, then 78, etc. Cards back in order.
snoComic over 9 years ago
When I was programming in high school (late 1960s), the board of education provided punch card services, even for students. It was a bit of shock to go to the University of Waterloo and discover that first year students (1970) had to do their own card punching.
dgmiller over 9 years ago
When I started grad school (1961), we had a giant CONTROLDATA computer requiring data entry via teletype tape. By 1964, we had advanced (?) to punch cards.
dwdl21 over 9 years ago
Read Bloom County, learn computer history, Oliver Wendle Holmes would be proud…lol