O the "joys" of standing in line to use one of the department's hulking 026 (later 029) keypunches, the tricks of duping a card up to the point where you needed to either add or delete punches and then holding one card while letting the other feed. Heaven forbid if you dropped a 2000 card box or a 3000 card tray and the cards weren't sequenced in cols. 73-80. You learned quickly to sequence by 10s or 20s or even 100s to leave room for the inevitable insertions. It was well into the 70s or early 80s before we trusted tapes and disks enough to give up our trusty file cabinets full of card decks.

The binary cards from punched object decks could be folded at one end to make a point, arranged & stapled on cardboard in concentric circles (point out), and sprayed gold to make a very pretty Christmas wreath. We still have one tucked away with the old Christmas stuff. Although it's somewhat the worse for wear, it's probably the only one left in existence.

Although I wouldn't give anything for the experiences of those days, I wouldn't do them again for anything, either.

Mark Jarvis
old IBM & GE mainframe, 80s PC, and 90s Unix veteran.


Lyle Tuttle wrote:
At 04:33 PM 7/7/2009, you wrote:
You little youngsters don't know the meaning of hardship.

Back in my day you got monochrome and 40x25 characters and counted
yourself lucky!

Before that it was fuzzy white on black with a dumb terminal and a 300
baud acoustic coupler.

Before that it was on a dot matrix printer with a keyboard.  Get it
right quick or you waste a lot of paper!

At least I'm not old enough to have suffered with punch cards

I am......while the SDS computer system (16K core) ran 5 real-time experiments on the face of the reactor.......and another x-ray diffraction counter in another area.......careful!!  Don't drop those!!!

That was a looooong time ago.........
  

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