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by dullroar
2290 days ago
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I am old (I have seen things). I still have my first program from college, in FORTRAN, on a card deck. I also worked as a "computer operator" (an extinct species) while going to college, putting card decks in the readers, running decks that were output from the punches through "interpreters" (which printed the characters across the top of cards), and remembering that you always (ALWAYS) drew a diagonal line across the top of a deck of cards with a pen, in case you dropped them (colloquially known as a "floor sort"). If you wanted to be really fancy, you'd use different colored cards for different sections of a program, but that was rarely worth the effort. Good times. Besides card punches, readers and interpreters, other quaint machines I dealt with on a daily basis were chain printers (with carriage tapes - look it up), reel-to-reel tapes (which required cleaning the heads with isopropyl alcohol and cotton swabs once a shift), and the most evil of all, decollators (again, look it up). All controlled via consoles that didn't have cursor keys, so to this day I have the TERRIBLE habit of backspacing to nuke and fix typing mistakes rather than cursoring and surgically correcting them. I bet the Backspace key on my keyboard is probably in the top 10 keys in my usage profile. :) |
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One of my favorite stories is from those punched card days. I was a careless teen, and knocked one of the developer's card decks off of a desk, sending all the cards scattered widely across the floor.
The sysadmin made me gather them up and manually sort the several thousand cards into the proper order. It took a over a day. When I was done, he took them from me and dropped them into the hopper of a machine in the corner to "check my accuracy".
What he didn't say, and I didn't know until weeks later, was that the machine he used was a card sorter and could have put the entire deck into the correct order automatically. The dev made me sort the cards manually as punishment -- and it worked, as I was much more cautious from then on.