Path: csiph.com!v102.xanadu-bbs.net!xanadu-bbs.net!feeder.erje.net!eu.feeder.erje.net!news-1.dfn.de!news.dfn.de!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Sylvia Else Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2014 12:54:15 +1000 Lines: 30 Message-ID: References: <20140428143101.ef28cbd2.rsw@therandymon.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: individual.net hTX/ytKVvHI5qqvW6FrteAN2UWCgShpNKEOErCL2HxKRU+tCHO Cancel-Lock: sha1:YHJyiC0hckK02NYL0sFXjErszgU= User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.4.0 In-Reply-To: <20140428143101.ef28cbd2.rsw@therandymon.com> Xref: csiph.com comp.misc:2512 On 29/04/2014 12:31 AM, RS Wood wrote: > Interesting reminiscence, courtesy of Simon Allardice and Hacker News: > http://simonallardice.com/general/2014/03/17/first-computer.html > > //---snip > And when you were finished handwriting a section of code - perhaps a > full program, perhaps a subroutine - you'd gather these sheets together > (carefully numbered in sequence, of course) and send them along to the > folks in the data entry department. > > They'd type it in. > > And the next day you'd get a report to find out if it compiled or not. The next day, I'd always find out that it hadn't compiled, because the people in the data entry department were chronically incapable of punching what I'd written. I ended up punching them myself, because it was much quicker. OK, this was at university. Perhaps they employed card punch operators who were too incompetent to get jobs in industry. This must have been right at the tail-end of punched card usage. Other than generating the occasional OS binary patch, I never used them in gainful employment. Sylvia.