A little bit of history

[zeitghost]

You're thinking of programming*. The data cards we had used all 80 columns, though they usually had something like an invoice number and a sequence at the beginning so that you could sort them if needs be.

The card sorting machine was a wonderful device. Some poor lass spent 3 weeks sorting a year's cards and then the trolley full of the sorted cards lost a wheel and the lot hit the deck. Another 3 weeks sorting for said poor lass.

* I do remember wondering why that early version of FORTRAN ignored characters after column 72. It was a swine to debug the first time you experienced it after entering the proggie on an 80 column terminal.

The GA had wonderful utilities like SQCM that put the file name & index number from 73 to 80.

If you had a deck with more than 999 cards, the number would roll over to 000.

Which had the possibility of trauma in the event of rubber band failure.

Then there was SCMP that ensured that what you thought you'd punched had actually arrived on the cards.

Dear dead days now in the landfill.

GA spc16 documentation rave from the grave:

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/general...mmary_1973.pdf

Dunno if you'll be able to see this, it may require IEEE access rights:

IBM 1800 - GHN: IEEE Global History Network

All about the IBM 1800 process control computer from 1964.

Some of which may still be in use.


And this is a bit of history from 1974: the 4040, plus news of some lune controlling a 1MW nuclear reactor with an 8008.

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/microco...1n06_Dec74.pdf

[Freamon]

Nice little video:

[Lockhouse]

In my first job out of uni I met a very good friend who ran a rail company as a sideline of his lifelong university IT support work who told me he used to feed those cards into a computer as his nightjob when he first started work, he couldn't be arsed sometimes (not knowing the hardword or importance of the things) and often came up with things like "well we were having a fire extinguisher fight and they got wet so i told the student it didnt compile" or "i was carrying several boxes of cards to the machine room, spotted a stunning young woman, fell over the carpet and dropped the f!!kign lot over the floor, scooped them up as best as I could and fed them into the machine the order i thought they'd fell but unluckily the program didn"t compile. the student was truly gutted, i di feel bad though..." and such stories....

What happened at our site was that it was done for a joke, the head programmer didn't realise that his newly punched program had been swapped out for a box of used cards when they were "accidentally" spilled all over the floor in front of him....

I started out as an Operator and learnt to use the punch machine and the backup hand punch for when it went wrong. I also learnt to program on coding sheets in pencil with topped and tailed "I"s and "0"s with a line through them. These were then sent away for punching. Only the senior guys got their work double punched (i.e. verified) as it was more expensive. For a long time we were only allowed one compile a day. I got my own back in the end as I wrote the "4GL code" (ho ho) that replaced our punched cards so that instructions could be given to the system via the operator's terminal directly.