Punch cards

[RCR]

Punch cards --- Argh --- takes me back to my first real job --- as a programmer for a life insurance company. We wrote code on specially marked forms which then went to the typing pool to be punched onto the cards.

If we had to do our own punching, we used a punch machine the size of a desk. Any wrong holes in the cards were corrected with little red stickers. The monster we fed was an IBM 360 mainframe.

I lasted a whole 12 months as a programmer and hated every minute of it. I do have to admit to using a card as a bookmark when travelling on public transport - I thought it made me look brainy.

[Mike L]

I didn't think I was that young

I didn't think I was that old.

[NormHart]

Originally Posted by Mike L

We always used to say that you couldn't call yourself a computer programmer until you had dropped a 2,000-card tray containing your program, and put the cards back in the right order -- by hand.

LOL, well I've dropped a few boxes of those but I always had access to a sorter. Now lets really challenge the youngsters;

What languages did you use?

Me Fortran and Cobal, My Mom and Sister RP1 I think.

And yes I've done programing on them punching in the command lines and programing on paper tape, and I've even programmed using banks of switches.

First program I ever did was on a TI calculator. A kind of assembly language as I remember.

LOL Now it's gigabyte networking, oh my.

[Mike L]

Hi NormHart,

I started with Autocoder for the IBM 1401, then moved to an assembly language (I think it was just called Assembler) for the ICT 1900 Series.

But then I decided to stop lurking in the past and embrace the 1960s, so I learned Cobol and never looked back.

My ICT 1900 programs were on 7-track paper tape. Much easier on the muscles than a tray of cards, but much more difficult to edit one instruction in the middle of the code.

Did you ever learn to read punch cards (I mean with you eyes, not with a machine)? I was pretty good at it, but I wouldn't have a clue nowadays.

[NormHart]

Good god, I think we shocked them into silence! (no mean feat on this board)

I barely remember Assembler, I believe we used it while fooling around with UC Berkeley's IBMs. Wrote odd little games as I remember, high school students sneaking into the basement and talking the tech's into bad behavior. LOL

I could scan the cards and pick out salient code but really couldn't read them.

Fortunately most of the programs I did on TTY tape were fairly short and if I remember right we could snip out good sections and dup them into our main program tape. Gads that was a few years ago.

Anyway I am almost certain that Nate the great's "analog ebooks" are a cover for some extremely covert attempt to resurrect or salvage some poor companies or countries programs.



BTW did you ever use Hermes Mike L? (for those of you who don't know that was email before there was email or the internet for that matter.)

[Mike L]

NormHart,

Now you mention it, I remember editing paper tape by splicing and pasting. We would stretch the tape over a little plastic gizmo that had a slit to guide a knife. That way we would get a clean cut. We'd cut out the unwanted length of tape, insert some new tape, and paste the whole thing back together with some sort of adhesive tape.

No, I didn't know Hermes. My earliest contact with email wasn't until 1984. That was a system we had here in the UK called Telecom Gold. I think it was about the time that Compuserve and The Source were just getting underway.

[NormHart]

Yeah, if you weren't military or part of a university with mil connections you probably didn't see the forerunner of the Internet, ARPANET. Hermes ran on that. It was really slick! You could leave a message on the system for any registered user and they could pick it up from any system that was on ARPANET anywhere.

Amazing!!!

[vivaldirules]

I would be quite curious to know who has a working card punch machine and a working card reader - and why, oh god, why! I hate to say that my employer still has some PDP-8's in use (and when they die, we're doomed), but there's no way there are card readers on them (I think).

[RWood]

OK guys and gals, here are some of the languages I have used over the years:

• COBOL
• FORTRAN
• BASIC
• Assembler (IBM 360/370 and DEC PDP-10)
• Easycoder (Honeywell Series 200)
• JCL
• ADA
• Pascal
• FORTH
• C/C+
• Algol
• APL
• Plus a whole lot of application specific command languages like CULPRIT, PRG, RP1, TSAM, IPL, and GIS

For databases

• IMS
• DL/I
• IDMS
• dBase/FoxBase/Xbase
• SQL (multiple flavors)

Email systems started with DecNet in the 1970s and CyberText.