More Groaning (Jun 10 2009)

Not to mention the fun of dropping the stack of punch card as you prepare to load your latest program.

I worked at a place where we got quite nifty at using a card punch which didn't have a keyboard - instead you had to remember the hole combinations. Colleagues checked each other's cards. We found we could fix mistakes by placing a piece of chad in the hole and rubbing it in with a pencil. This was fine until the card reader on the mainframe was changed and decided to knock out all the loose pieces of chad.

Ya know they made little pieces of opaque tape that you could put over the holes in error...

This of course is the origin of the 72-character line length, on a machine fed by 80-column punched cards. The last eight columns are reserved for an index number. The IBM 029 card punches we used could even be programmed to insert an automatically-incremented number in the index columns.

Some cards had the field identified on the printed face, e.g.
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/cards/collection/bell1.gif
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/cards/collection/fortran.gif
(borrowed from this computing history site - http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/cards/history.html )

You programmed the punch with another card, wrapped round a little drum - it's behind the little window in the middle of the picture here

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taouu/html/ch02s01.html

If you drop the deck, curse quietly, collect them all and drop them into a card sorter (e.g. an IBM 082) programmed to sort by the last eight columns.

http://www.technikum29.de/en/devices/punchcard-sorter.shtm

On the way you pass the poor guy who dropped his unindexed data stack last night and is still trying to rebuild it :-)

I sometimes miss punched cards. The card stock was high-quality, it had to be to stand up to the high-speed card readers, and they were useful for all manner of cardboard-technology projects, as well as shopping lists :-)

This of course is the origin of the 72-character line length, on a machine fed by 80-column punched cards. The last eight columns are reserved for an index number. The IBM 029 card punches we used could even be programmed to insert an automatically-incremented number in the index columns.

Some cards had the field identified on the printed face, e.g.
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/cards/collection/bell1.gif
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/cards/collection/fortran.gif
(borrowed from this computing history site - http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/cards/history.html )

You programmed the punch with another card, wrapped round a little drum - it's behind the little window in the middle of the picture here

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taouu/html/ch02s01.html

If you drop the deck, curse quietly, collect them all and drop them into a card sorter (e.g. an IBM 082) programmed to sort by the last eight columns.

http://www.technikum29.de/en/devices/punchcard-sorter.shtm

On the way you pass the poor guy who dropped his unindexed data stack last night and is still trying to rebuild it :-)

I sometimes miss punched cards. The card stock was high-quality, it had to be to stand up to the high-speed card readers, and they were useful for all manner of cardboard-technology projects, as well as shopping lists :-)

I met a card reader that would occasionally bend the first card into a U shape with the points down. All subsequent cards in the deck would hit the U and bounce onto the floor (all over the room).

Anyone else remember drum printers? Anyone else remember what happened when you printed a line of underscores followed by a page feed?

I do recall one PDP system we had that suddenly started to re-boot itself when no-one was around. After much headscratching, this was tracked down to the latest batch of fan-fold paper on the line-printer being wood-free and building up an excessive static charge; eventually it would throw a spark to the nearest earthed metal and...

F.
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The main problem I found with drum printers is that the print line came out wavy when doing a high-speed printout.

I do recall one PDP system we had that suddenly started to re-boot itself when no-one was around. After much headscratching, this was tracked down to the latest batch of fan-fold paper on the line-printer being wood-free and building up an excessive static charge; eventually it would throw a spark to the nearest earthed metal and...

F.

And then there was the janitor who kept unplugging the modem so he could use the outlet for the floor buffer...

I do recall one PDP system we had that suddenly started to re-boot itself when no-one was around. After much headscratching, this was tracked down to the latest batch of fan-fold paper on the line-printer being wood-free and building up an excessive static charge; eventually it would throw a spark to the nearest earthed metal and...

F.

And then there was the janitor who kept unplugging the modem so he could use the outlet for the floor buffer...

I was around when one vax unplugged itself by melting the line cord.

I have seen the results of a program that would move the disk heads on one of the washing machine sized disk packs at the resonant frequency of the cabinet. Walked across the floor to the limit of the line cord.

I was operator for a Honeywell 6000, which used a drum printer - it was real interesting, because one of the instructors (this was a college machine...) would always assign the class to do a picture (in FORTRAN, using FORMAT statements). Some members of the class would always discover how to do overprinting, and you'd get a distinctive WHAP, WHAP as a line of M's followed by a line of W's was printed (for the darkest tone...)

The H 6k had replaced an IBM 360, and that was also interesting - the same overprinting sounded like ZIP, ZIP... This was with an IBM 1403 chain printer.
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I wonder if today's DPers ever had to worry about writing self-relocating code for a system (such as the old IBM 360 series) and had a program size limitation of 16K using one base register. You could construct OVERLAYS, and the boss alweays frowned on self modifying code techiques? COBOL was a dirty word to the PURIST and you had to be proficient in "STAR" messages from autocoder. And would they know the difference between a word and a wordmark? And what was a phantom 11 punch used for (except to mickey mouse your electric bill which came to you in punch card format}? Operators could call in the FE and almost tell them what part to bring with them. And how about the disaster plan chaos when you had to unload 8 2314 disk drives and get them outside in 5 minutes?
What fun it was to sneak over to the OTHER SYSTEM and slip a carriage control tape on the 1410 that had no channel 12 punch on it!

[snip]
What fun it was to sneak over to the OTHER SYSTEM and slip a carriage control tape on the 1410 that had no channel 12 punch on it!

I wonder if today's DPers ever had to worry about writing self-relocating code for a system (such as the old IBM 360 series) and had a program size limitation of 16K using one base register. You could construct OVERLAYS, and the boss alweays frowned on self modifying code techiques? COBOL was a dirty word to the PURIST and you had to be proficient in "STAR" messages from autocoder. And would they know the difference between a word and a wordmark? And what was a phantom 11 punch used for (except to mickey mouse your electric bill which came to you in punch card format}? Operators could call in the FE and almost tell them what part to bring with them. And how about the disaster plan chaos when you had to unload 8 2314 disk drives and get them outside in 5 minutes?
What fun it was to sneak over to the OTHER SYSTEM and slip a carriage control tape on the 1410 that had no channel 12 punch on it!

Try writing a graphics program in 640K. The basic problem is that the graphics themselves take vast amounts of RAM. So, yes, even with 640K there were some very good reasons for overlays. The code also had some self modifying code (that was a royal PAIN to debug. I did not write that bit). We also had home grown Virtual Memory as this was before Windows had a VM system...

Thanks for the update.

As to O/S everyone touts what they run.

I don't quite see how to get rid of the file clerk completely so I suspect there will always be an O/S. Might be remote, but it will be there.

Thanks for the update.

As to O/S everyone touts what they run.

I don't quite see how to get rid of the file clerk completely so I suspect there will always be an O/S. Might be remote, but it will be there.