Ray Mears

Gordon said:

Chris Malcolm <[email hidden]> wrote

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

IMHO punched cards are an IBM perversion. Of course it was natural for
card tabulating companies to develop into computer companies, but ICT
wasn't so silly as to go for the primacy of punched cards with all the
associated nonsense of fixed length fields and records which has led
to absurd space and time wasting in large files and databases, and all
those insanely silly Govt forms with little boxes for each letter of
your name and address.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

When I trained computer programmers anyone silly enough to use fixed
length records had a rolled up punched card stuffed up a nostril and
lit.

Quoted message said:

I'm sure I remember dropping a bunch of punched cards in my early days
at ICT/Ferranti/ICL, circa 1970.
(The real delight of punched cards was sorting a mixed-up pile)!

Of course card readers and punches were a popular peripheral. The
question was whether or not it was the default I/O system. There were
folk in ICT who preferred it to be paper tape, and the systems were
designed that way, but the customer is always right.

Quoted message said:

There were even people around who could read cards visually, and who
were adept at manual punching keyboards to do mods, a skill which soon
died out.

The practice died out, but the skill lingers on. I still have my
manual paper tape punch (which unlike a card punch, could be carried
in a pocket). But I've forgotten the simple binary code sequence you
could add to the end of a program tape to make the program auto-enter
and zeroise itself. So it would report an illegality as it fell off the
end. So the operators would try to print a core dump to find out what
had gone wrong. But core dump prints suppressed lines of zeros. So the
printer never moved.

If you were lucky they'd call an engineer. What laughs we had in those
days!
--
Chris Malcolm [email hidden] +44 (0)131 651 3445 DoD #205
IPAB, Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK
[http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/]

jake said:

In message <[email hidden]>, Gordon
<[email hidden]> writes

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

I'm sure I remember dropping a bunch of punched cards in my early days
at ICT/Ferranti/ICL, circa 1970.
(The real delight of punched cards was sorting a mixed-up pile)!

Quoted message said:

I once got caught up in a revolving door while carrying two trays of
punched cards. I went into the building -- the cards went onto the
pavement outside.

Quoted message said:

At 2,000 cards a tray, that was some re-sorting exercise.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

There were even people around who could read cards visually, and who
were adept at manual punching keyboards to do mods, a skill which soon
died out.

Quoted message said:

Of course, if you made an error (in manual punching) you could simply
fill in the holes with 'chads' (a word that dropped out of use until the
last US election) and over-punch the column again.

Quoted message said:

I've told that to many people in today's IT business.

Quoted message said:

But no-one believes me.

It was a *very* useful skill. Suppose you had just written 2,000 lines
of code. You gave the sheets to the punch girls to punch. They got say
200 lines mispunched. (At 50 chars a line that's an error rate of
0.2%, quite good when your productivity is measured in cards per
hour. Yup, managers trying to be efficient made things worse then
too.) The computer noted the errors and the print returned to you the
next day. You submitted 200 corrected lines. You got them back and
inserted them in your deck. The next day you got the error listing
back. 20 of them were wrong.

<fast forward>.

.... This time there were only 2 wrong. You'd spent a whole elapsed
week correcting mispunch errors. You had 2 cards to correct. It would
take at least two hours to get them punched, inserted in the deck,
packaged up with the right control sheets for the operators, and sent
off to the machine room. You'd get the listing the next day. And there
was a one in five chance there'd be a mispunch.

AAARRRGGHHHH!

Doing quick fixes on a manual card punch was a tedious skill to learn
and practise, but it could save you a *lot* of wasted time, perhaps
even prevent a heart attack or suicide.
--
Chris Malcolm [email hidden] +44 (0)131 651 3445 DoD #205
IPAB, Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK
[http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/]

"Chris Malcolm" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...

<snip>

Quoted message said:

...So [the computer] would report an illegality as [the tape] fell off the
end. So the operators would try to print a core dump to find out what
had gone wrong. But core dump prints suppressed lines of zeros. So the
printer never moved...

Some of the time. I recall a friend punching a set of cards for a programme
as a CSE Computing project in 1975. The cards were duly sent to the
Borough's mainframe for the programme to be run, and the resulting printout
to be returned. Unfortunately, instead of coding "EOF", he'd made an error
that the computer read as "divide by zero" - which, of course, has a result
of infinity. The chainwheel printer churned out about eight thousand pages
of zero's before an operator spotted the error, and the listing paper
printout was duly returned in a transit van with "Thou shalt not divide by
zero" scrawled in red marker pen across the front page of each set...

--
MatSav

jake <[email hidden]> wrote

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

I once got caught up in a revolving door while carrying two trays of
punched cards. I went into the building -- the cards went onto the
pavement outside.

:-)

Quoted message said:

At 2,000 cards a tray, that was some re-sorting exercise.

Quoted message said:

There were even people around who could read cards visually, and who
were adept at manual punching keyboards to do mods, a skill which soon
died out.

Of course, if you made an error (in manual punching) you could simply
fill in the holes with 'chads' (a word that dropped out of use until the
last US election) and over-punch the column again.

I've told that to many people in today's IT business.

But no-one believes me.

I do remember repairing paper tape on a little jig, and re-punching a
few holes to make it readable. There were a few small utility
programs we found convenient to store on paper tape, and the bootstraps
to suck in exec programs were paper of course.
--
Gordon

On Wed, 6 Oct 2004 09:59:53 +0000 (UTC), [email hidden] (Chris

Malcolm) said:

Doing quick fixes on a manual card punch was a tedious skill to learn
and practise, but it could save you a *lot* of wasted time, perhaps

....and a good apprenticeship for when PPT came along...