Re: Punch Cards

[ed]

On Fri, 2008-04-04 at 06:12 -0400, fedora-list-request(a)redhat.com wrote:

>  > The card reader jams were common and so was the old drum/chain
> printers
>  > --- jamming paper during a printout was common. 
>  
>  And did you ever have someone dead loop their program sending form-feeds
>  to a printer in another room, the wrong printer, that nobody saw
>  churning its way through an entire box of paper?  The really big A3
>  blue-stripe fan-fold.  Even worse when the paper-output spills out of
>  the hopper...  ;-)
>   
Or some  pre-printed form's wording is incorrect, and you the programmer
were supposed to notice it after printing 50 boxes of paper!!!!
-- 
Ed Gurski

Linux User 
# 458454  http://counter.li.org

Punch Cards

[Tom Horsley]

My favorite punch card recollection from the good old days
almost defies belief.

Registering for classes at FAU back in the last century involved
getting your master ID punch card at the admin building, then
schlepping around all over campus to each department where they
had pre-punched cards for all the available slots in all the
classes.

You'd collect all the cards for all the classes you wanted to take,
then bring them back to the admin building where the real magic
would happen:

With the master card in front of the class cards for each student,
the cards would be piled into one of those massive patchboard
programmable duplicators. This would copy the student ID from the
master card and punch it onto the following class cards, except
when it failed to recognize the next master when it would continue
to duplicate the ID on the next student's master.

Fortunately the highly trained operators could detect the sound
of ID numbers being duplicated on top of cards that already
had ID numbers on them and stop the machine so the screwed up
cards could be taken out and new copies punched by had to feed back in
on another try.

Once the ID numbers were on all the cards, you'd take the fantastic
pile of cards accumulated and bring them to the other machine:
The card sorter where, in pass after pass through the night, the
intrepid operators would eventually get the cards sorted by ID.

Finally this offering of cards was fit to be fed to an actual
computer program which would update a new student record tape
from the sorted input cards and the old tape in a classic
one pass update algorithm.

In a major upgrade to the system at one point, they got rid
of the patchboard duplicator, and instead fed the cards to a
computer program which did the duplication of the ID numbers
and punched out a new deck they could then run through the
sorter :-). [How many trees did that kill I wonder].

To the question of why they couldn't do the sort on the computer
as well, the answer was always "don't ask".

I'm aware that this boggles the mind, but I swear this is the
absolute truth (if I was gonna stretch things, I'd have put in
something about having to carry boxes of cards through sniper
fire :-).

Punch Cards

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Sat, 2008-04-05 at 11:19 +1030, Tim wrote:
>  On Fri, 2008-04-04 at 09:45 -0400, Ed Gurski wrote:
>  > Or some  pre-printed form's wording is incorrect, and you the
>  > programmer were supposed to notice it after printing 50 boxes of
>  > paper!!!! 
>  
>  You'd often see that sort of thing when someone thought they could do a
>  better job of working out where the top of the form was, and they'd
>  count lines in their program, doing all form placement using line feeds.
>  Instead of not trying to print on all available lines, telling the
>  printer the real form height, and using a form-feed command to let the
>  printer find the top. 
Absolutely the worst case for this was when printing checks.

VOID	VOID	VOID	VOID...

>   
-- 
                Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs

Punch Cards

[Michael Eager]

Tom Horsley wrote:
>  On Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:45:16 -0400 
>  I seem to recall they paid some fantastic sum of money for an
> advanced
>  system that would let you keep your card decks on disk and edit them
>  and submit the jobs from the disk copy - no one used it, the editor
>  was so awful - real cards worked much better. 
There were a couple products which did this.  I'd used both of the main
products at one time or another.  The one I used most was PanValet, if I
recall correctly.  It was a reasonable step up from keeping boxes of
cards on the shelf.  Which always seemed to have several versions of
the desired program, none of which matched the executable on disk.  The
editor was primitive, but adequate.

I worked as Systems Programmer for a well-known Chicago magazine
publisher, maintaining HASP/MVT or JES2/MVS, I don't recall which.
The applications folks had purchased PanValet and were using it.  I
suggested to the Systems Manager that we use it as well.

Well, if the Applications Manager liked something, the Systems Manager
was sure to hate it.  And vice versa.  There was an open position for
Director above both of them and both wanted the position.

So I ended up listening to the perils of depending on disks for our
precious sysgen decks and how card decks were much more dependable.
I guess they were much more valuable than our accounts payable or
subscription files.

-- 
Michael Eager	 eager(a)eagercon.com
1960 Park Blvd., Palo Alto, CA 94306  650-325-8077

Punch Cards

[Tim]

On Fri, 2008-04-04 at 09:45 -0400, Ed Gurski wrote:
>  Or some  pre-printed form's wording is incorrect, and you the
>  programmer were supposed to notice it after printing 50 boxes of
>  paper!!!!  
You'd often see that sort of thing when someone thought they could do a
better job of working out where the top of the form was, and they'd
count lines in their program, doing all form placement using line feeds.
Instead of not trying to print on all available lines, telling the
printer the real form height, and using a form-feed command to let the
printer find the top.

-- 
(This computer runs FC7, my others run FC4, FC5 & FC6, in case that's
 important to the thread.)

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.
I read messages from the public lists.

Punch Cards

[Tom Horsley]

On Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:45:16 -0400
Ed Gurski <ed(a)gurski.com&gt; wrote:

>  > > The card reader jams were common 
I'll say one thing for punched cards though - a deck of cards and a
duplicating punch were the best available text editor for many years :-).

You could do block moves of text - just move a chunk of cards in the deck.

You could insert characters on a line - just dup the card, then hold down
the original real hard so it couldn't move when you get to the insert
column, type your new charaters, then finish the dup.

You could cut & paste by duping cards, then inserting the new ones
in the right place.

I seem to recall they paid some fantastic sum of money for an advanced
system that would let you keep your card decks on disk and edit them
and submit the jobs from the disk copy - no one used it, the editor
was so awful - real cards worked much better.

And from the latest stories on the Census bureau's attempt to
computerize, I see the state of the art hasn't advanced much :-).