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. :)
I'm old, too. I learned to program on punched cards, and remember the move to high-speed paper tape. That was awesome!
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.
As someone who first started using computers in the 90s, I lacked the tactile experience with cards that the generation before mine had. I long suspected that I had missed something by not having used punched cards, little realizing just how much I had missed.
What was shocking to me about punched cards is the indelible mark that they left on modern day computing. Why do terminals default to 80 columns? That’s the width of a punched card. Why do tabs have variable length? The key used to move to the next “field” on a punched card, by way of a physical tab stop. Why did FORTRAN reserve the first few columns to line numbers? So you could put your FORTRAN deck in a card sorter if you dropped it.
The link above seems to mirror the first part of the exhibit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, which is well worth seeing in person.
Even better are the live demonstrations of the IBM 1401 that are also done at the Computer History Museum on Wednesday‘s and Saturday’s: http://ibm-1401.info/
This is not quite accurate. The first few columns were reserved for an optional numeric statement label that could then be used as a target for an IF or GOTO statement (and we used lots of those!) Labels did not have to be in numerically increasing order.
On the other hand, the last few columns of the card were ignored by the compiler, and could indeed be used to hold numerical values. These could be used to sort the deck of cards if you dropped it. The choice of numerical values in this column was not trivial because of the way programs were edited to fix bugs: you manually removed some cards and inserted new ones into the deck. You never repunched the whole program.
Why COBOL has that 80 character limit. But for far reaching legacy hangovers, you can't beat the QWERTY keyboard when it comes to tech. A layout born to slow down typists in a way to prevent the hammers jamming upon mechanical keyboards of old.
But the legacy of punched cards is deeper with that 80 character limit and bank card data formats and many other things had that character limit consideration come into play.
So if you ever see a data field that seems to arbitrary have around 70-80 characters(rest used for transaction ID, EOR char, checksum char(s) to pad the 70+ to the full 80 characters), it may well be down to punched cards if you go down the historical rabbit holes.
The layout for this page is so interesting and useful! Each section divided into little bookmarks, with each bookmark having its own bar denoting how much content is held in it. Never seen anything like it before, and it works great for this format.
Punch cards were also quite durable, you could dump them in a punch in 'dup' mode to make a backup, and usually they had printed across their tops the text on them so it made reading them pretty simple.
[+] [-] dullroar|6 years ago|reply
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. :)
[+] [-] JohnFen|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jf|6 years ago|reply
What was shocking to me about punched cards is the indelible mark that they left on modern day computing. Why do terminals default to 80 columns? That’s the width of a punched card. Why do tabs have variable length? The key used to move to the next “field” on a punched card, by way of a physical tab stop. Why did FORTRAN reserve the first few columns to line numbers? So you could put your FORTRAN deck in a card sorter if you dropped it.
The link above seems to mirror the first part of the exhibit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, which is well worth seeing in person.
Even better are the live demonstrations of the IBM 1401 that are also done at the Computer History Museum on Wednesday‘s and Saturday’s: http://ibm-1401.info/
[+] [-] litoE|6 years ago|reply
On the other hand, the last few columns of the card were ignored by the compiler, and could indeed be used to hold numerical values. These could be used to sort the deck of cards if you dropped it. The choice of numerical values in this column was not trivial because of the way programs were edited to fix bugs: you manually removed some cards and inserted new ones into the deck. You never repunched the whole program.
[+] [-] Zenst|6 years ago|reply
But the legacy of punched cards is deeper with that 80 character limit and bank card data formats and many other things had that character limit consideration come into play.
So if you ever see a data field that seems to arbitrary have around 70-80 characters(rest used for transaction ID, EOR char, checksum char(s) to pad the 70+ to the full 80 characters), it may well be down to punched cards if you go down the historical rabbit holes.
[+] [-] icedata|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DerekL|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nexuist|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ivansavz|6 years ago|reply
The titles appear onmousover for the "bookmarks" -- although I don't think the are bookmarks but stacks of punchcards.
[+] [-] DonHopkins|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cpr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teddyh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eesmith|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gorgoiler|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woofyman|6 years ago|reply