Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for March 28, 2022

Some punch line

Punch cards had sharp edges, unless the computer room flooded from a leak from the cooling system, then they turn to mush. Don’t aske me how I know.

Don’t worry, computer punch cards won’t be around that long. They will go the way of the platter disk drives and FORTRAN.

Looks like the relationship has decided to go public. And why not! Our girl is looking pretty hot!

If you want something practical, forget about education and business.

Try engineering (structural, mechanical, electrical, chemical) , architecture, medicine, veterinary medicine, or pharmaceutics. (IT didn’t really exist then.) Or law, if you must.

Teaching requires you to first know something to teach. That’s what you major in. Learning how to teach needs just a one-year course.

Business you learn on the job. Pretending it is an academic subject is just a way for universities to get paying sucke … er … students.

Her father sounds like my daughter in law’s dad he didn’t want her going to graphic arts school She is now an excellent graphic artist.

Oh, I forgot the joys of punch cards.

And debugging your Fortran program and creating flowcharts.

I’m not sure I can keep track of yet another strip that has taken up a timeline into the past.

Art requires Talent.

Same. I got the business degree my parents preferred, but after a layoff, ended up building a career as a graphic designer anyway.

On my second visit to Washington DC and my second visit to the C&O Canal, I noticed a plaque that noticed the computer punch card system was invented in a building by the canal in Georgetown, to help complete a census. That was an unexpected historical reference.

Those familiar with the strip, are these repeats of earlier strips, or new? I know via Wikipedia how they got together was covered in an earlier series of strips, but these are the first I’ve seen showing them in the ’70s. Thanks!

What is Arlo’s post graduation occupation, or don’t we know?

My dad advised me not to go into something I enjoyed (like paleontology); he said it would ruin it for me. So I started in engineering but ended up with a career in IT which was interesting enough and paid the bills.

Business for women at that time: punching cards all your life.

I am old enough that yes, in high school, we had a class where we actually punched cards for early IBM computers.

Woe be onto you if you didn’t number your punch cards!! And no, you couldn’t correct a mistake, just repunch the darned thing.

This means that at a minimum Arlo and Janis are now in their late sixties.

I don’t remember…what do Arlo and Janis do for a living?

Punching computer cards? Been there. My first year in university, I used punch cards when programming in Fortran on a mainframe. My first foray into an endless loop. The Dean Of Engineering was NOT impressed…but I was. lol

As a guy who punched cards as a summer job, I can say Janis is right.

Arlo laying back just agrees………….

Those cards went away so quickly. They were gone by 85.

So far, the line “bummer man!” still has not been uttered.

Or keyboards….

What did Janis do when she worked?

Thank you JJ. I am glad you decided to roll with this arc another week. Very nice!

HEY…Fortran was a dynamic programing language.

Lordy, Lordy. I remember when key-punch operator was a prestigious job for young women (naturally); considered higher than secretary. That didn’t last too long.

I remember being encouraged to learn key-punch when my high school offered it. I snorted. I’d had three drafting classes and I was going to be a draftsman. And I was, for a long time.

For younger readers [if there are any] who don’t know what a computer punch card is, it was how programs and data were input to a mainframe computer prior to the development and deployment of terminals. They were 7 3/8" long by 3 1/4" high and created on a machine that literally punched little holes into them corresponding to the keyboard characters. Each card represented one line of code or data. Thus a complete program would be in the form of a stack of those cards which would then be fed into the computer with a hopper. The computer would run the program and produce a printout of the desired result or, in many cases, an error report. Using the report, the user would need to find the cards with the errors and re-punch them being very careful to keep them all in the correct sequence. A complex program could involve a very large deck of cards and inevitably, someone would drop one and have to deal with the onerous task of putting them back in the correct order.

As a Computer Science major in 1978 I worked in the computer lab at Western Ky. Univ. “Our” mainframe was at U of K so my job was to take students card deck, read it in then wait for results to print, then wrap around the card deck and place in the out tray. The first year it was only minutes then second year (computer science was taking off!) it took hours for results to come back. I could place all jobs on hold then release just mine and get it back quickly. The perks of working in the lab.

Things have progressed quickly.

How old do you have to be to get the punch card reference? ☺

It was more fun that you would think. Ah, those good old Hollerith cards….

The computer fad won’t last anyway.

oh yes, the IBM 5081 card. LOL

By 1975 the hospital system I worked at had already done away with punch cards. They did have those big reel to reel tapes though.

That is the body that Janis misses having.

My career was in IT also. My 1st computer for training was an old Univac. No monitor or keyboard. Rotary dials and switches. Used a Basic type language. You created a source code deck on a keypunch machine then fed it into the Univac with a compiler deck. Out would come an object deck that you would include with your data deck. Your results would come out on the dot matrix printer.

How old are Arlo and Janis supposed to be now? If they were in college in 1975 and say, 18 or 20, they would be early 60’s now.

So they’re in their 60’s now?

Ah, punch cards and paper tape programming… wow, I’m old.

I keyed punch cards as a summer job in the late ’70’s! Thank you for the flashback.

My high school library used punch cards for the “due date” slips in books that were checked out. I still have an un-returned book with a punch card in it.

Wow. All these comments by computer nerds. You’re missing the social commentary here. This is a dig at the jobs that were available for women with a business major in the late 70s and 80s. It has nothing to do with programming languages.

No comments about JJ telling us the college was in California?