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I did my Fortran in high school on punched cards, because the small timesharing system we had (a Cromemco Z80-based S-100 bus machine with a handful of terminals) had a habit of crashing and eating files - but it couldn't eat cards. We had a couple of surplus IBM 029 card punches, and they were a blast to use - they had nice crisp keyboards, and when you pressed a key the machine punched the corresponding holes with what felt like a major league bat hitting a major league fastball pitch - it was a really hard thwhack. Very satisfying. I remember being astonished when my dad told me how they handled punch card accuracy at his office: engineers would write out their programs on (special) paper forms (i.e. a box for each character on each line), and hand the forms off to the computer department, where they'd have two different keypunch operators key in the program. Then they'd feed the two stacks of cards into a special punched-card-comparator machine, which would tell whether the decks matched. If so, it was considered successfully transcribed (and one of the decks could be thrown away). I also remember reading a story long ago about decks of cards containing scientific programs being sent by rail between cities in two different countries in Europe (IIRC), and they kept having problems with the programs not working. Finally, they sent a courier along with the box of cards at one point. And, as the train crossed the border, the customs inspector boarded the train and checked passports and such, and inspected goods that were being transported, and, as is customary, took a sample from many of the transported goods (as one might take a bit of grain, say)... and, yeah, they took a couple random cards out of the box. Problem identified, if not immediately solved. |