Tale of a 40-something a few years from now

George Toft wrote:
>
> "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?"

ROFLOL!!!!

"Sonny... Have I ever told you about the time some of the programming
jokers wrote an assembler script to swing the heads on the ol' removable
platter disk drives? Well, they set it to moving back and forth about
evry half second until the disk started walking away from the wall. Of
course they had to wait to do this until halloween..."

-----------------

"... Have I ever told you about the time we learned that we could
program the dot matrix printer to sing?"

"no grampa. How did you teach it to sing?"

"Well sonny, when the pins strike the paper they make a sound, and if
you know how fast the pins are moving up and down you can get them to
strike the papere at a certain frequency. From there all you need to
know is the frequency of whatever not you want -- like 440 Hz is a
"middle C"."

"did it sing really well grandpa?"

"Not exactly. It sang like Janis Joplin after after Madigra. But it
was music to our ears."

"Grandpa.... What's a Joplin?"


EBo --