Punched Cards

Daniel_Bingamon · Post by **Daniel_Bingamon** » Thu Nov 18, 2004 6:44 am

Hey, we can make up our own punched cards.

http://www.kloth.net/services/cardpunch.php

Maybe Dale can add a Chiff & Fipple punched card to the C&F Authenticity Statement or combine them.

Now, you too can access the big Sperry Univac mainframe at the Chiff and Fipple headquarters at the base of mountains outside Birmingham.
The access numb.. is...^C^C#### MESSAGE INTERCEPTED- AUTHORIZATION: CHIFF AND FIPPLE SECURITY

happyturkeyman · Post by **happyturkeyman** » Fri Nov 19, 2004 10:50 pm

Imagine the reaction if you could tell someone in the early 80's about a computer program that makes punch cards for you!

brewerpaul · Post by **brewerpaul** » Sat Nov 20, 2004 7:11 am

Gee, thanks for reminding me about these things

Back in the 70's when I first got my hands on a computer at Union College in Schenectady, you had to enter all of your programs on Hollerith cards. First you wrote your program on paper. Then you went to the computer center, waited for a keypunch machine, and typed in the program line by line, one line to a card, along with a card identifying yourself. The cards were placed in a rack outside the actual computer room and were run by the computer techies. A day later, you'd get back a paper printout plus your stack of cards which you'd take back to your dorm and try to debug. You'd then have to figure out what went wrong with the program: something as minor as an extra space, wrong character etc could bounce the whole thing. Find the offending card(s), go back and type new ones, put the stack back for re-running, continue in this fashion until your assignment ran correctly. For a newbie, writing a very simple program in BASIC (eg, find the average of 15 numbers and print the result) might take two weeks to get properly.
The computer was a GE mainframe with hand wired memory consisting of tiny magnetic "donuts". It had those tape drives you see in old Sci Fi movies, huge multi disc hard drives etc. Total core memory? 64K!!! We've come a long way baby!!

Jerry Freeman · Post by **Jerry Freeman** » Sat Nov 20, 2004 10:18 am

Back in that same era, a wiseacre friend of mine programmed the school mainframe to print wallpaper for his dorm room. Seems to have tied up the computer for a long time, and he got into a bit of trouble for it.

Best wishes,
Jerry

RonKiley · Post by **RonKiley** » Sat Nov 20, 2004 11:44 am

Brings back a lot of memories, not necessarily good ones. I used to be able to read the cards in two different codes but don't ask me now which ones they were. When I first started I wrote in machine code and entered it by hand through front panel switches. Then we got a marvelous thing called an assembler. We didn't use cards at first. We used punched paper tape. Read in at 10 cps. Imagine compiling a Fortran program at that speed. A simple program took 8 hours to compile, link, and load.

The good old days, right!

Ron

brewerpaul · Post by **brewerpaul** » Sat Nov 20, 2004 1:38 pm

Jerry Freeman wrote:Back in that same era, a wiseacre friend of mine programmed the school mainframe to print wallpaper for his dorm room. Seems to have tied up the computer for a long time, and he got into a bit of trouble for it.

Best wishes,
Jerry

Reminds me of one of the very first computer viruses of that era. It was called Thunderbird. When executed, it would print the word "Thunderbird" and then slew to the top of the next page and repeat. It created some sort of little internal machine language loop which couldn't be broken without shutting down the whole computer!

Lambchop · Post by **Lambchop** » Sat Nov 20, 2004 3:51 pm

brewerpaul wrote:Gee, thanks for reminding me about these things

Back in the 70's when I first got my hands on a computer at Union College in Schenectady, you had to enter all of your programs on Hollerith cards.

Just reading this gave me an anxiety attack. I used to drag around shoeboxes full of cards and spent a small fortune paying computer geeks to figure out what was wrong with them. Fortran was one of the most horrible experiences of my life. It gave me a case of computer phobia so severe that I later became unglued at the sight of an Atari commercial.

Brrrr!

brewerpaul · Post by **brewerpaul** » Sat Nov 20, 2004 4:09 pm

Peggy wrote:[quote="brewerpaul
Just reading this gave me an anxiety attack. I used to drag around shoeboxes full of cards and spent a small fortune paying computer geeks to figure out what was wrong with them. !

Want an anxiety attack? Ever DROP one of those shoeboxes full of cards?

Lambchop · Post by **Lambchop** » Sat Nov 20, 2004 4:38 pm

Want an anxiety attack? Ever DROP one of those shoeboxes full of cards?

Aaaauuuuuuugggghhhh!

Daniel_Bingamon · Post by **Daniel_Bingamon** » Sat Nov 20, 2004 11:28 pm

1st year of college, basic on a GE computer connecting via teletype and the basic programs were stored on paper tape.

FJohnSharp · Post by **FJohnSharp** » Sun Nov 21, 2004 12:13 am

I learned first-hand an important rule: Don't drop your punch cards.

DCrom · Post by **DCrom** » Mon Nov 22, 2004 11:10 am

Dropped your punched cards? Verily, brothers and sisters, ye have suffered. I'm another one who used to be able to read both punch cards and paper tape. An ability happily forgotten. Although I was good at it, my college's setup was so cumbersome (punch cards, leave deck to be run in batch mode, come back later . . . 3 runs a day at 8:30, 12:30, and 4:30 and no mercy if you're late) that I might have given up on programming if they didn't also have microprocessor training systems available:

256 bytes of RAM, 512 bytes of ROM, an octal keyboard, a LED display, and a hardware breadboard area. Write your programs in 8080 assembler, hand-assemble to octal, and enter through the keyboard in octal. But it fit into a briefcase, and you could check it out to take home.

It was only the charm of a computer you could control yourself that kept me interested in programming. I even wrote a couple of simple game programs to run on the silly thing.

Just for comparison: my current home system has a 3 GHz CPU and 1.5 GBytes of RAM. Adjusted for inflation, it costs less than that 8080 based system cost back in the late '70s.

Will O'B · Post by **Will O'B** » Mon Nov 22, 2004 11:35 am

My hat goes off to Tim Joyce who was in Mrs Moore's high school math class with me in 1967. True story:

Following Mrs Moore's explanation of why we needed to understand how to solve problems algebraically, Tim pointed out that he didn't need to learn the stuff because he was going to have a computer do the work for him. After everyone finished laughing at poor Tim and chiding him because no room in his house would be big enough to hold his future computer, he simply replied, "It's going to sit on my desk." When the laughter from that died away, Mrs Moore responded, "But if you want it to work, you're going to need to know how to program it." Tim remarked, "Other people will have already done that for me." Freaky stuff -- Tim was either a prophet or a time traveller . . . I'm still not sure which.

Will O'Ban

PS: For all of you chiffers out there from Kansas City, Mrs Moore was the aunt of Larry Moore the Newscaster in Kansas City. Larry's younger brother, Bobby later designed some computer chip for Nasa space missions and also designed the landing mechanism for the original craft that landed on Mars. Bobby was the valedictorian of his class at the University of Missouri - Columbia, and no one (including his family) knew this until they read about it in the local paper.

TyroneShoelaces · Post by **TyroneShoelaces** » Tue Nov 23, 2004 8:24 am

Will O'B wrote: Following Mrs Moore's explanation of why we needed to understand how to solve problems algebraically, Tim pointed out that he didn't need to learn the stuff because he was going to have a computer do the work for him. After everyone finished laughing at poor Tim and chiding him because no room in his house would be big enough to hold his future computer, he simply replied, "It's going to sit on my desk." When the laughter from that died away, Mrs Moore responded, "But if you want it to work, you're going to need to know how to program it." Tim remarked, "Other people will have already done that for me." Freaky stuff -- Tim was either a prophet or a time traveller . . . I'm still not sure which.

Will O'Ban

that is pretty freaky if you consider what computers were like in 1967. but i suppose someone has to dream up a product before it's actually created.