just in case you've got an excess of punch cards and a lack of Christmas decor...
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the whole book is available on @internetarchive , of course https://archive.org/details/makeitwithpunchedcards1971
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and our own punch card wreath (contemporary with the book) is up for the winter break - 50+ years old and not in too bad of shape, though the lights need re-strung.
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@mediaarchaeologylab LOL I grew up with the only paper in the house being old punch cards, because my mom used to code them for her job.
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@ai6yr @mediaarchaeologylab I almost got in trouble once for leaving a pile of punch cards at the front of the classroom for a prof. I may have triggered a traumatic flashback.
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@dr_a @mediaarchaeologylab
(flashback to 1950, when prof was a student)
"Hi professor! Here's my homework... I worked on it all night!" (slips on floor) "WHOOPS! AWWW CRUD! I DROPPED THE ENTIRE STACK!!! 😭 "
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@ai6yr @dr_a @mediaarchaeologylab
old trick was to send through a card with every hole punched out. basically guaranteed a jam as it shredded the card
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@pixelpusher220 @ai6yr @dr_a @mediaarchaeologylab Those were the fun days. We did that a few times just for fun, of course when the boss wasn't around. Trying to reproduce the card in the reproducer was fun, hearing all punch dyes go down at once with a kaboom! The not so fun part was having to clear the jam and cleaning the mess out of the punch dyes.
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@uccawx @pixelpusher220 @ai6yr @dr_a @mediaarchaeologylab just the sound is enough to bring back horrific flashbacks for me!
Bus rides to the local university at midnight with my precious box of cards because they would run batch jobs with about 10mins turnaround for free at that time
Hoping desperately that should I be unlucky enough to drop the deck that the elastic bands and diagonal sharpie slashes would be enough to get it all back together again.
Fun times!
😂
https://youtube.com/watch?v=SWD1PwNxpoU
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@ai6yr @mediaarchaeologylab apparently he witnessed a computer center operator launching someone’s stack through the pickup pigeonhole and bursting on the floor.
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@ai6yr @dr_a @mediaarchaeologylab
ooh! floor sort!
you only do one of those before you learn to make a diagonal marker line across the top of the deck. so much faster than trying to read sequence/card numbers.
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@paul_ipv6 @ai6yr @dr_a @mediaarchaeologylab Holy shit, wish I could go back to 1975 and tell myself this hack.
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@mazz @ai6yr @dr_a @mediaarchaeologylab
i had a part time job for the army, feeding decks into a card reader and breaking down printouts. i was lucky i was working with folks that knew stuff about cards. :)
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@mazz @paul_ipv6 @ai6yr @dr_a @mediaarchaeologylab
I have a number of old punch cards on my desk, come to think of it. I use them as bookmarks, but now I have more ideas.
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@rk @mazz @paul_ipv6 @ai6yr @dr_a @mediaarchaeologylab I use to make Christmas wreaths out of them…
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@rk @mazz @paul_ipv6 @ai6yr @dr_a @mediaarchaeologylab imagine if we could interrupt our former selves, typing our cards at the punch machine, and explain what exactly these are:
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@John @rk @mazz @ai6yr @dr_a @mediaarchaeologylab
LOL
if we have time travel, my past self would have asked to be cryogenically frozen until those flash drives were ready. :D
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@paul_ipv6 @John @mazz @ai6yr @dr_a @mediaarchaeologylab
When I saw terabytes of storage in the micro SD format I quite literally felt a sense of vertigo.
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@paul_ipv6 @ai6yr @mediaarchaeologylab one of the other tricks was not irritating the computer center operators. Apparently they had made a copy of the deck first, but ...
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@paul_ipv6 @ai6yr @dr_a @mediaarchaeologylab
this is one reason certain early languages reserved card columns 73-80 for sequence numbers, or had leading line numbers.
an offline card sorting machine could reorder a dropped deck semi-automatically.
In 1978 I was paid to operate such a machine since my time on it cost less than the IBM 370 (maybe already a 3033?) SORT command after loading a deck to disk, and tomorrow was soon enough.
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@n1vux @paul_ipv6 @dr_a @mediaarchaeologylab LOL on being used as a cheaper option than running a computer command, ha ha.
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@ai6yr @paul_ipv6 @dr_a @mediaarchaeologylab
And I was making better than minimum wage, tho' undergrad intern p/t wage wasn't good, it was still better than other p/t available.
Mainframes were expensive and not terribly fast yet then, even at college's internal billing rate. (Still expensive but much faster and more parallel so much less per CPU HOUR today, inflation corrected.)
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@n1vux @paul_ipv6 @ai6yr @dr_a @mediaarchaeologylab
I think this was in fortran until fortran95 ?
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@llewelly @paul_ipv6 @ai6yr @dr_a @mediaarchaeologylab
I'm not sure of when/how it was phased out, but yes, FORTRAN ii, iv, G/H, 68 had reserved columns to the right, and COBOL to the left. (Fortran had numeric STATEMENT LABELs to the left, sequence to the right, so LABELs weren't required to be sequential numbers. I suspect COBOL's dual use left numbers were required to be sequential?)
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@llewelly @paul_ipv6 @ai6yr @dr_a @mediaarchaeologylab
{ I did very little COBOL. Helped two friends with their Survey of Languages homework, without taking the class myself (I had a used copy of an IBM 702 hardbound manual which included short COBOL tutorial! which was sufficient to advise on a HELLO WORLD assignment) and for work in 1980ish ^wrote^ two copy-pasta lines of COBOL when adjusting a DB schema. }
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@n1vux @paul_ipv6 @ai6yr @dr_a @mediaarchaeologylab
in the late 1990s I was in college, I became hugely interested in the history of programming languages, and know that sort of thing (if I know it at all) mainly from reading in that era, not from direct experience.
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@llewelly @paul_ipv6 @ai6yr @dr_a @mediaarchaeologylab
this is good, in several measures !
(When I was teaching OO Design and C++ in the 1990s, I have no idea what our Survey of Languages included. Possibly the 1950s big 3 were still there as chapters (Lisp, Cobol, Fortran), Algol68 as origin of structure, which would one drop? Or move to 2-semester History of ... and Survey of Modern ... ? IDK; when lecturing I only read the course catalog entry for my class, none since.
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@n1vux @llewelly @ai6yr @dr_a @mediaarchaeologylab
i learned COBOL at the same time i was learning C/UNIX.
my experience was:
COBOL: spend 10 minutes thinking about logic, 4 hours typing, 4 hours correcting syntax errors before it finally compiles. 10 minutes debugging after it compiles, then it works.
C: spend 10 minutes thinking about logic, 30 minutes typing, program compiles just fine. core dumps as soon as i run it. debug/type. repeat the compile/dump/debug for 4 hours. then it works.
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@paul_ipv6 @llewelly @ai6yr @dr_a @mediaarchaeologylab
heh. sounds right.
on the DEC-10, our DBMS and our green-screen key-to-disk package both included code generators for COBOL so changing form and schema produced flawless new Data Sections, so I only needed to clone the If good then copy else error statement for appropriate data type when inserting a new field 17A. Easy peasy.
0 time debugging, production change ready on first compile.
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@ai6yr @dr_a @mediaarchaeologylab
My major professor did his bachelor degree in Minnesota. He recalls someone taking his entire PhD research contained on punch cards across campus one day when a gust of wind scattered those thousands of cards to the four corners of the state.
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@dougfir @dr_a @mediaarchaeologylab Ooops
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@dougfir @ai6yr @dr_a we've heard variations on that story pretty frequently 😩
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@mediaarchaeologylab @dougfir @ai6yr @dr_a I got a degree there too and also heard of this story.
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@dr_a we've got a stack in the front room and it definitely triggers some haunted looks on occasion
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@ai6yr @mediaarchaeologylab my dad would bring home huge sheets of pin feed paper and punch cards from work
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@mediaarchaeologylab
https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102667304
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@mediaarchaeologylab the holes make the lampshade one perfect
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@mediaarchaeologylab we did make the wreaths in elementary school. I have no idea who was supplying the cards.
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