Working Daze by John Zakour and Scott Roberts for February 22, 2018

WAYY back, I took an “Introduction to Computing” class which used punchcards. I think I saw Fred Flintstone as one of the instructors.

I recall using a computer system where you loaded the bootstrap by setting 8 switches the pressing another, repeat until all the instructions are loaded.

BTW I still have a Freiden Flex-a-writer. It reads punch cards and types out the content and/or punches a paper tape.

Don’t forget to draw a diagonal line across the top of the card deck in case they get dropped. Made it much easier to get back in order.

I remember a certain camaraderie among the regulars in the keypunch room. I also remember the competition to use the model 29 punches instead of the old model 26s.

I had the same experience in college. Imagine writing a compiler on punch cards…

We’re about a few more replies from "When I was a kid … " stories, aren’t we?

Ahh, Fortran with do loops and nested do loops

in 1971, my college roommate found out I had taken typing in high school and asked me to help him with his punch card program. After more redo’s than I care to think about we finally finished. I swore then I’d no use for computers. Of course later I became a programmer. Go figure.

Something that kept Ed from sleeping? The mind boggles!

Load “*”,8,1Run

I was in the last class that took assembler on cards. After that semester, they piled all the punch machines up in the parking lot. They should have provided sledgehammers and charged by the wack. They’d have made a fortune.

The IBM 029 card punch machine sounded like an ongoing car crash when operated by a reasonably skilled typist.

When I started in the gov’t (only 24 years ago) we used to do our timekeeping on punch cards. I did learn computer programming using punch cards to assemble our programs (back in 1981) and, yes, I drew a diagonal like across the time of my deck (starting after the first time I dropped it). LOL

I actually nodded off once and found I typed zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

I always thought the “good years” of my job as programmer were when we were allowed to load our punched cards in, along with any tapes or disk drives, and operate the computer when testing our programs. Eventually, the “suits” decided that was too dangerous for the company and banned us from running the computer ourselves.

I just missed the punch card era. I started on a DECWriter II teletype.

Nowadays, I can spin up as many VMs as I want on my laptop, each of them millions of times faster than the old PDP’s. Test what I want to, and discard them when I’m done. And the new folks think that’s normal.

You can tell someone from those days if his face turns white when you say “shuffle the deck.”

I had a computer course in high school in punch card days. And people say “Great! You can get a job as a key punch operator.” And even then, I thought “Why would any rational human being CHOOSE to be a key punch operator?”

At least with cards you didn’t have to wait for the clay tablets to dry.

I remember “Basic” and “Turtle” programming languages! Vaguely!

When I first started in the computer business, one of my customers, (Holiday Inns in Memphis) was using system 360’s, but they still had in place and occasionally used an IBM 1401, a Hollerith card based system introduced in 1959. And Exxon was using an IBM 1800 system to monitor off-shore oil flow systems into the 1980’s. I maintained the 5 megabyte capacity hard drives that were the size of washing machines, and the system had an impressive 64K of memory which occupied a box bigger than a full size kitchen refrigerator.

Thank you all. My husband and I have enjoyed these recollections of the old days, which we shared.

One last comment; One of the devices I supported in the 80’s was a large robotic computer tape subsystem silo (the StorageTek Powderhorn 9100). A few years back I was touring the robotics section of the Deutsches Museum in Munich, when lo and behold, what do I see on display? Seeing something you used to work on in a museum will definitely make you feel your age.

I once met an old man who was having no luck trying to log into one of our time-share computers. As I went to help him, the system went down for three days with a hard memory error (I think I may have static-zapped the console). I chatted with him a while and wondered why he looked so familiar. Then I saw his name badge and realized I was talking with J. W. Mauchly, co-inventor of the ENIAC and UNIVAC, co-founder of our company. I quickly reviewed what I had been saying to him and realized I’d be explaining how hard it was to compete with IBM, as if anyone on earth would know that better. Never got to meet Eckert though.

Never had to listen to key punching of cards. I started out coding on coding sheets – sheets of paper with a grid of 24 lines of 80 boxes. One character per box.

Write the code on those, then pop it into the In-tray for the punch operators to turn into cards, which were usually ready by the next

Load the cards, submit it to the batch compilation queue and wait to see if it compiled.

If not, write out replacement lines and get those punched into cards. Repeat until clean compilation.

The queue for execution and start testing.

You learned VERY quickly not to write typos and how to desk-check code before submitting it. Once very competent (about a year after leaving college), you could get a completed and tested programme in just two passes, sometimes first time.