http://georgetoft.com/georgeslaw.shtml
From my college days . . .

"Hey, Grampa, tell us the story about 80 column punch cards, and why a
good rubber band was your best friend. You mean you couldn't just talk
to the computer?"

"Well, Sonny, columns 1-5 were for your numeric labels. A 'C' in column
6 meant it was a continuation from the previous line, and your code went
in columns 7-72. Columns 73-80 were your card sequence number and it was
optional. Nobody liked to put numbers there because if we moved a block
of code, we would have to resequence the cards. Screw that - just make
sure you had a good rubber band, and another one as a backup in case the
first one broke. Gives you a whole new meaning of data backup, huh."

"Grampa, what was the deal with column 1 on the printer?"

"Oh, yeah. Put a 1 in column 1 and the printer won't advance. Print
about 10 lines with this:
1====================================================
and all of the print wheels on the line printer would line up and the
strikers would synchronize and go WHOMP WHOMP WHOMP and shake the whole
computer center. Heh, heh, heh. The computer operators would jump out of
their skin - they definitely knew when I ran a job."

"Grampa, what's a line printer?"



George Toft, CISSP, MSIS
623-203-1760




Mark Jarvis wrote:
> (repost using email address I signed up with)
>
> In 1960 (+ or - a year) I took a programming class at ASU where we used
> the LGP-30.  It had a 1000 (1024?) word drum and each word was 32 bits.
> The drum was the main memory--there was no other storage.  It had
> 16--yes 16!--instructions with paper tape input and typewriter output
> and it had a one or two inch oscilloscope where you could watch the
> instructions execute.  Part of each instruction was the address of the
> next instruction to be executed.  Too few today have the assembly
> language background to appreciate the oddities of  the machine, but it
> had some doozies.  Five years later I had graduated and was working at
> Motorola Semiconductor on McDowell and transferred into the computer
> section of the QC department.  We had a GE 205 computer with 8192 20 bit
> words of memory.  If I remember correctly, a single word memory access
> took 36 microseconds.  When sorting 30 row, 12 column table using the
> Shell sort algorithm, the console lights made a several second long
> pattern that was quite easy to spot.  BTW, the 205 was the entry level
> knockoff of the GE215 box.  Since the 215 had a memory cycle time of 18
> microseconds, GE added a bunch of circuit boards to steal every other
> clock cycle to make the machine slower so they could lease it for less.
> Go figure!
>
> Yes, for lots of years I used decks of cards for both programs and
> data.  If you had any sense, you sequenced your cards in col 73-80 so
> that when (not if--when) the deck was dropped, a few passes through the
> sorter would fix things--and you initially sequenced by 10s or 20s to
> allow for later additions.
>
> While I wouldn't take anything for the experiences of those years, I
> wouldn't go back to them for anything either.
>
> Mark Jarvis
>
> Jim wrote:
>
>
>>Lynn Newton wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>But I'm sure there are a number of subscribers to this list
>>>who can one-up me with "I remember when" stories, by margins
>>>of several years at least.
>>>
>>>
>>
>>I don't know if this would be in the one up category, but I remember
>>being a high school freshman in 1981 and spending time after school in
>>the math teacher's room messing around with his TRS80 with a whopping
>>4KB RAM and running programs stored on cassette tape.
>>
>>
>>
>
>
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