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the days of punch cards and coding in pencil

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  the days of punch cards and coding in pencil RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2014-04-28 14:31 +0000
    Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil Tim Streater <timstreater@greenbee.net> - 2014-04-28 17:15 +0100
      Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil Will Honea <whonea@whonea.net> - 2014-04-28 11:02 -0600
        Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil Tim Streater <timstreater@greenbee.net> - 2014-04-28 18:30 +0100
          Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil Scion <a.b@nospam.invalid> - 2014-04-29 10:08 +0000
        Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil Huge <Huge@nowhere.much.invalid> - 2014-04-28 20:55 +0000
      Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil polygonum <rmoudndgers@vrod.co.uk> - 2014-04-28 20:19 +0100
        Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil Tim Streater <timstreater@greenbee.net> - 2014-04-28 20:45 +0100
          Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil Paul Sture <nospam@sture.ch> - 2014-05-01 17:49 +0200
            Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil polygonum <rmoudndgers@vrod.co.uk> - 2014-05-01 20:25 +0100
              Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil Huge <Huge@nowhere.much.invalid> - 2014-05-01 21:01 +0000
              Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil Paul Sture <nospam@sture.ch> - 2014-05-01 23:16 +0200
      Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil Jerry Peters <jerry@example.invalid> - 2014-04-28 20:10 +0000
        Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil Huge <Huge@nowhere.much.invalid> - 2014-04-28 20:58 +0000
      Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil despen@verizon.net (Dan.Espen) - 2014-04-28 16:59 -0400
      Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil Andy Burns <usenet.feb2014@adslpipe.co.uk> - 2014-04-30 09:51 +0100
        Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil Adrian <bulleid@ku.gro.lioff> - 2014-04-30 19:02 +0100
      Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet@bsb.me.uk> - 2014-04-30 22:05 +0100
        Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil Tim Streater <timstreater@greenbee.net> - 2014-05-01 08:15 +0100
          Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet@bsb.me.uk> - 2014-05-01 15:59 +0100
      Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil Paul Sture <nospam@sture.ch> - 2014-05-01 17:45 +0200
        Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil Tim Streater <timstreater@greenbee.net> - 2014-05-01 19:06 +0100
          Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil Will Honea <whonea@whonea.net> - 2014-05-01 13:27 -0600
            Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil Tim Streater <timstreater@greenbee.net> - 2014-05-01 20:37 +0100
              Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil Jerry Peters <jerry@example.invalid> - 2014-05-01 20:08 +0000
              Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet@bsb.me.uk> - 2014-05-01 22:15 +0100
            Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil Dag-Erling Smørgrav <des@des.no> - 2014-05-02 12:58 +0200
              Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil Will Honea <whonea@whonea.net> - 2014-05-02 12:36 -0600
          Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil Paul Sture <nospam@sture.ch> - 2014-05-01 22:59 +0200
    Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil Sylvia Else <sylvia@not.at.this.address> - 2014-04-29 12:54 +1000
      Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil despen@verizon.net (Dan.Espen) - 2014-04-29 10:19 -0400
        Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil Paul Sture <nospam@sture.ch> - 2014-05-01 18:01 +0200
          Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil Paul Sture <nospam@sture.ch> - 2014-05-01 18:56 +0200
      Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil Chris J Dixon <chris@cdixon.me.uk> - 2014-05-02 08:59 +0100
        Re: the days of punch cards and coding in pencil Tim Streater <timstreater@greenbee.net> - 2014-05-02 10:57 +0100

Page 2 of 2 — ← Prev page 1 [2]

#2568

On 2014-04-28, Tim Streater <timstreater@greenbee.net> wrote:
> In article <20140428143101.ef28cbd2.rsw@therandymon.com>, RS Wood
><rsw@therandymon.com> 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.
>
> Largely cock. You might write your code on sheets, but then you'd go
> find a card punch and create your deck of cards, make it into a job
> with some data, and test it. By the time I was a professional
> programmer (1968), I'd be getting the results an hour or so later.

Not cock at all.  I started my IT career with this crap.

But I was unlucky enough to be working on ICL kit.  Even the brand new
stuff in 1977 used cards.

Fortunately another job came along where we used a PDP-11/34 and I was
rescued from punch cards forever.  Yes, even when we moved to an IBM
mainframe, we got the choice and had the first IBM mainframe in the UK that
shock, horror, had no card reader.  It confused the dickens out of visiting
software engineers who would arrive with a bunch of cards :-)

> No one has ever "typed my program in", except me. And by the early 70s,
> on-line systems meant that punched cards started to go out.
>
> "Data entry department" my arse.

We had one.  A "Portable" entirely mechanical card punch that we kept in
the computer room was faster for small programs.

-- 
Paul Sture

The final step of #heartbleed recovery is to call your mother, and advise
her to change her maiden name                                  -- @gojomo

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#2574

In article <6p6a3b-l1e.ln1@news.chingola.ch>, Paul Sture
<nospam@sture.ch> wrote:

> On 2014-04-28, Tim Streater <timstreater@greenbee.net> wrote:
> > In article <20140428143101.ef28cbd2.rsw@therandymon.com>, RS Wood
> ><rsw@therandymon.com> 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.
> >
> > Largely cock. You might write your code on sheets, but then you'd go
> > find a card punch and create your deck of cards, make it into a job
> > with some data, and test it. By the time I was a professional
> > programmer (1968), I'd be getting the results an hour or so later.
> 
> Not cock at all.  I started my IT career with this crap.
> 
> But I was unlucky enough to be working on ICL kit.  Even the brand new
> stuff in 1977 used cards.

I'm not saying cards were crap (well, they were, but that's not what
I'm getting at). I'm expressing my astonishment at the idea of sending
off sheets of code to somewhere to be punched. Everywhere I've worked
at - or visited - had little clusters of 026 or 029 card punches that
you sat at and did it yourself.

-- 
"People don't buy Microsoft for quality, they buy it for compatibility
with what Bob in accounting bought last year. Trace it back - they buy
Microsoft because the IBM Selectric didn't suck much" - P Seebach, afc

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#2578

Tim Streater wrote:

> I'm not saying cards were crap (well, they were, but that's not what
> I'm getting at). I'm expressing my astonishment at the idea of sending
> off sheets of code to somewhere to be punched. Everywhere I've worked
> at - or visited - had little clusters of 026 or 029 card punches that
> you sat at and did it yourself.
> 

AH! A youngster!  026/029 was not inexpensive gear - same as printers which 
were also prized resources "way back when". Most of us have more processing 
power on our desktops right now than entire university or enterprise 
computer centers had in the 60s and early 70s so time in service was a a 
carefully managed resource.  Time-sharing wasn't an option and batch 
processing was the most common scheduling strategy.

My, how things changed!

-- 
Will Honea

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#2579

In article <tex8v.151685$RL1.137506@fx22.iad>, Will Honea
<whonea@whonea.net> wrote:

> Tim Streater wrote:
> 
> > I'm not saying cards were crap (well, they were, but that's not what
> > I'm getting at). I'm expressing my astonishment at the idea of sending
> > off sheets of code to somewhere to be punched. Everywhere I've worked
> > at - or visited - had little clusters of 026 or 029 card punches that
> > you sat at and did it yourself.
> 
> AH! A youngster!

Er, hardly. I broke my first computer in 1965.

> 026/029 was not inexpensive gear - same as printers which 
> were also prized resources "way back when".

Considerably cheaper than line printers, I should think. Why else would
the Imperial College computer room, in 1968, have had several for
public use, or the CERN computer Centre likewise. There was even a
small room near my office at CERN that had four 026 in there, usually
full of programmers modifying their programs.

> Most of us have more processing power on our desktops right now than
> entire university or enterprise computer centers had in the 60s and
> early 70s so time in service was a carefully managed resource.

Machine time was, yes. Programmer time was cheap.

-- 
"People don't buy Microsoft for quality, they buy it for compatibility
with what Bob in accounting bought last year. Trace it back - they buy
Microsoft because the IBM Selectric didn't suck much" - P Seebach, afc

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#2580

Tim Streater <timstreater@greenbee.net> wrote:
> In article <tex8v.151685$RL1.137506@fx22.iad>, Will Honea
> <whonea@whonea.net> wrote:
> 
>> Tim Streater wrote:
>> 
>> > I'm not saying cards were crap (well, they were, but that's not what
>> > I'm getting at). I'm expressing my astonishment at the idea of sending
>> > off sheets of code to somewhere to be punched. Everywhere I've worked
>> > at - or visited - had little clusters of 026 or 029 card punches that
>> > you sat at and did it yourself.
>> 
>> AH! A youngster!
> 
> Er, hardly. I broke my first computer in 1965.
> 
>> 026/029 was not inexpensive gear - same as printers which 
>> were also prized resources "way back when".
> 
> Considerably cheaper than line printers, I should think. Why else would
> the Imperial College computer room, in 1968, have had several for
> public use, or the CERN computer Centre likewise. There was even a
> small room near my office at CERN that had four 026 in there, usually
> full of programmers modifying their programs.
> 
>> Most of us have more processing power on our desktops right now than
>> entire university or enterprise computer centers had in the 60s and
>> early 70s so time in service was a carefully managed resource.
> 
> Machine time was, yes. Programmer time was cheap.
> 
Not compared to a data-entry operator's time it wasn't. 

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#2583

Tim Streater <timstreater@greenbee.net> writes:

> In article <tex8v.151685$RL1.137506@fx22.iad>, Will Honea
> <whonea@whonea.net> wrote:
<snip>
>> 026/029 was not inexpensive gear - same as printers which were also
>> prized resources "way back when".
>
> Considerably cheaper than line printers, I should think. Why else would
> the Imperial College computer room, in 1968, have had several for
> public use, or the CERN computer Centre likewise.

I don't think you can infer relative cost from relative numbers.  The
numbers of card punches vs printers depends on the kind of service you
run.  If you were mainly printing bills and pay sips from largely static
programs you'd need several of the very fastest printers you could buy,
but you might be happy with one card punch.  On the other hand, a
general-purpose computer lab, serving a large number of users, will need
lots of punches but might manage with one medium-speed line printer
since all it has to do is keep up with the average output rate.

<snip>
-- 
Ben.

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#2609

Will Honea <whonea@whonea.net> writes:
> Most of us have more processing power on our desktops right now than
> entire university or enterprise computer centers had in the 60s and
> early 70s [...]

Are you kidding?  I have more computing power *under the skin of my left
shoulder* than an entire university or company had in the 1960s.

Taking "on our desktops" literally, all I have on my desktop at the
moment (not counting whatever is built into my monitors) is a quad-core
Snapdragon 800 with 2 GB RAM and 16 GB flash.  On the floor of my home
office, on the other hand, I have more computing power and storage than
a medium-sized industrialized country had in the 1960s.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des@des.no

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#2613

Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:

> Will Honea <whonea@whonea.net> writes:
>> Most of us have more processing power on our desktops right now than
>> entire university or enterprise computer centers had in the 60s and
>> early 70s [...]
> 
> Are you kidding?  I have more computing power *under the skin of my left
> shoulder* than an entire university or company had in the 1960s.
> 
> Taking "on our desktops" literally, all I have on my desktop at the
> moment (not counting whatever is built into my monitors) is a quad-core
> Snapdragon 800 with 2 GB RAM and 16 GB flash.  On the floor of my home
> office, on the other hand, I have more computing power and storage than
> a medium-sized industrialized country had in the 1960s.
> 

Since we are going into ancient history I have to mention my favorite.  
While I was in grad school we got our hands on a surplus IBM disk drive.  
The maintenance tools included an adjustable wrench and a bag of rags for 
the times we had to work on the head positioning mechanism as it was 
hydraulic and prone to leaks.  It had 36 inch platters about .25 inches 
thick and spun fast enough we considered asking for hazard pay to work 
around it.  I forget the exact data capacity but it was in the megabyte 
range.  Still, it was a step up from drum memory...

-- 
Will Honea

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#2584

On 2014-05-01, Tim Streater <timstreater@greenbee.net> wrote:
> In article <6p6a3b-l1e.ln1@news.chingola.ch>, Paul Sture
><nospam@sture.ch> wrote:
>
>> On 2014-04-28, Tim Streater <timstreater@greenbee.net> wrote:
>> > In article <20140428143101.ef28cbd2.rsw@therandymon.com>, RS Wood
>> ><rsw@therandymon.com> 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.
>> >
>> > Largely cock. You might write your code on sheets, but then you'd go
>> > find a card punch and create your deck of cards, make it into a job
>> > with some data, and test it. By the time I was a professional
>> > programmer (1968), I'd be getting the results an hour or so later.
>> 
>> Not cock at all.  I started my IT career with this crap.
>> 
>> But I was unlucky enough to be working on ICL kit.  Even the brand new
>> stuff in 1977 used cards.
>
> I'm not saying cards were crap (well, they were, but that's not what
> I'm getting at). I'm expressing my astonishment at the idea of sending
> off sheets of code to somewhere to be punched. Everywhere I've worked
> at - or visited - had little clusters of 026 or 029 card punches that
> you sat at and did it yourself.

We were much smaller operation and there were only three of us who could
program, which wasn't enough to justify our own punch machines.  To boot,
most of our time was spent in operations rather than programming, because
we were running the previous year's accounts through the new system as a
parallel run.  The weekly payroll was a complete time sink as well.

After a year of that I was very glad to escape to a saner environment
with terminals, and a much greater proportion of my time could be devoted
to coding.

-- 
Paul Sture

The final step of #heartbleed recovery is to call your mother, and advise
her to change her maiden name                                  -- @gojomo

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#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.

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#2522

Sylvia Else <sylvia@not.at.this.address> writes:

> 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.

Must have been.

Some places I worked, normal was that the cards were punched by one
operator, then verified by another.  A verifier was another operator
entering the data all over again.  Each keystroke had to match the
original.  If there was a mistake, I had written the wrong thing.

I did a lot of my own punching, especially for small changes, but
no complaint about accuracy from the keypunch department.

-- 
Dan Espen

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#2570

On 2014-04-29, Dan.Espen <despen@verizon.net> wrote:
> Sylvia Else <sylvia@not.at.this.address> writes:
>
>> 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.
>
> Must have been.
>
> Some places I worked, normal was that the cards were punched by one
> operator, then verified by another.  A verifier was another operator
> entering the data all over again.  Each keystroke had to match the
> original.  If there was a mistake, I had written the wrong thing.
>
> I did a lot of my own punching, especially for small changes, but
> no complaint about accuracy from the keypunch department.

Yes we had the punch an verify system  and it caught most errors.  The
important thing was that separate folks did the punching and verifying
to catch transcription errors or ambiguous handwriting on the input forms.

The odd error still crept through but the original paperwork came to
the computer room along with the card decks, so it was easy(ish) to
fish it out and correct manually if the validation programs threw an
error.

I did a write up of this on another newsgroup last summer.  I'll dig
that out later today for your enjoyment :-)

-- 
Paul Sture

The final step of #heartbleed recovery is to call your mother, and advise
her to change her maiden name                                  -- @gojomo

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#2572

On 2014-05-01, Paul Sture <nospam@sture.ch> wrote:
>
> I did a write up of this on another newsgroup last summer.  I'll dig
> that out later today for your enjoyment :-)
>

Here we go:

<http://www.sture.ch/node/230>

-- 
Paul Sture

The final step of #heartbleed recovery is to call your mother, and advise
her to change her maiden name                                  -- @gojomo

[toc] | [prev] | [next] | [standalone]

#2593

Sylvia Else wrote:

>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.

I recall loading some calculations(1) onto a 360 in Stafford, via
card input at GEC in Trafford Park, in the early 70s.

Rather than wait a day for the results to come back, we then
drove to Preston, where we could see them printed out on a
teletype, at roughly the speed of the football results.  Don't
ask why this was.

The next time, a couple of years later, I had to do a similar
calculation, we used a Compucorp programmable calculator(2).

At the same time we had a technical document for each project
which was about 50 sheets of data, with items listed in a
particular sequence, which had to be frequently updated, with
pencil and eraser, and you could always guarantee that wherever
you had left spaces would not be where stuff needed inserting.

Our tame office nerd managed to write code that enabled us to
produce the document using the company 360, the data input for
each project being two full boxes of punch cards. The cards (a
pair for each item) had to be kept in the right order, so
dropping them wasn't ideal. We wrote the data and edits on coding
sheets, apart from bank holidays, when the punch staff were away,
and we could have a go ourselves.

At another company, which (following the move of an Engineering
Manager) used the same listing system, the Chief Engineer liked
working in Fortran, which was persuaded (a bit like dogs walking
on two legs) to perform the task. 

In due course, I got it working, and much more user-friendly in
dBase. My biggest success was to produce the hierarchy trees
(mounted on/ contains) from the component data.

Chris

(1) Start resistor calculations for the Class 313 EMU.  I think I
may still have some hand plots of the resultant curves in the
loft.

(2) I think this was it:
http://www.rskey.org/detail.asp?manufacturer=Compucorp&model=326+Scientist

Chris
-- 
Chris J Dixon  Nottingham UK
chris@cdixon.me.uk

Plant amazing Acers.

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#2604

In article <1lj6m9lb745gntfu7jq7i40m1d4iqq4g7b@4ax.com>, Chris J Dixon
<chris@cdixon.me.uk> wrote:

> Rather than wait a day for the results to come back, we then
> drove to Preston, where we could see them printed out on a
> teletype, at roughly the speed of the football results.  Don't
> ask why this was.

UK kit did have some strange peripherals. I remember visiting one
outfit that had some kind of online typewriter, and seeing it printing,
with the arms flashing up and down - and the carriage, too, as it
SHIFTed. It was explained to us that you could input programs with this
device, but that the compiler had to be very clever, as keywords were
underlined, and there was a myriad of ways to do this (letter +
backspace + underline, repeat, n*letter + n*backspace + n*underline,
etc). This was supposed to be clever.

> Our tame office nerd managed to write code that enabled us to
> produce the document using the company 360, the data input for
> each project being two full boxes of punch cards. The cards (a
> pair for each item) had to be kept in the right order, so
> dropping them wasn't ideal.

First thing a colleague of mine did at CERN was to write an editing
program so we could keep source programs on tape and just apply
diff-style updates. That made development a lot faster.

> 
> At another company, which (following the move of an Engineering
> Manager) used the same listing system, the Chief Engineer liked
> working in Fortran, which was persuaded (a bit like dogs walking
> on two legs) to perform the task. 

Well you *can* write compilers in FORTRAN if you are disciplined, see
f'rinstance the Wikipedia entry for PL-11. Not ideal though I agree.

-- 
"Freedom is sloppy. But since tyranny's the only guaranteed byproduct of
those who insist on a perfect world, freedom will have to do." -- Bigby Wolf

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