Never ride your bike at night,

[Simon Brooke]

in message <[email protected]>, Dave Kahn
('[email protected]') wrote:

> On Fri, 22 Oct 2004 19:41:19 +0100, Jon Senior
> <jon@restlesslemon_DOT_co_DOT_uk.remove> wrote:
>
>>In article <[email protected]>, [email protected] says...
>>> That's damm impressive. Hats off.
>>
>>In the C module I took at university, the examination was a closed
>>book programming exercise. While coding I've got used to being able to
>>insert a line between ones I've already written. Writing code on paper
>>without a computer is a wholly different art!
>
> When I started programming, in COBOL, it was all done on coding sheets
> then punched onto cards by data input clerks.

You had data input clerks? You soft jessie. When I were a lad, we had to
punch our own cards. Mind you, of course, this gave you the deep and
abiding joy of being able to drop them on the floor yourself and then
try to work out what order they were supposed to be in, rather than
having someone else do it for you.

--
[email protected] (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/

' ' <------- this blank intentionally spaced left

 

[Mark Thompson]

> You had data input clerks? You soft jessie. When I were a lad, we had to
> punch our own cards.

Punching our own cards? When I were a lad we had to shift 45 tonne blocks
of stone hewn from the cliffs and drag them into position 20 miles away! Oh
if only I'd been able to punch my own cards!

 

[Dave Kahn]

On Sat, 23 Oct 2004 22:35:06 GMT, Simon Brooke <[email protected]>
wrote:

>You had data input clerks? You soft jessie. When I were a lad, we had to
>punch our own cards. Mind you, of course, this gave you the deep and
>abiding joy of being able to drop them on the floor yourself and then
>try to work out what order they were supposed to be in, rather than
>having someone else do it for you.

For some reason the company considered it sensible to use data input
clerks for this task rather than have programmers, who were not
trained typists, spending days and weeks of their time performing a
purely clerical task when they still had a backlog of systems to
write.

--
Dave...

Get a bicycle. You will not regret it. If you live. - Mark Twain