Rabbit hole: stumbling across two Portuguese punched cards

[keybpo]

Found a reference to ENIASA - Instituto de Informática de Engenharia SARL (computer science engeneering). Rereading your post, I'm not entirely sure if it was just an academic publishing from maybe the same group or if a new branch for computers derived from the mecanograph educational offers. Curious use of ordenador istead of computador as it is nowadays, makes me wonder if it was an early adoption of the term computer.

It was submitted for registration and approved in 1970, according to Diário da República (similar to Federal Register in the US): https://files.dre.pt/gratuitos/3s/1970/09/1970d210s000.pdf , page 4, line 82 of that table. Or here: https://i.imgur.com/GyKPamu.png

[nunobrito]

It's still "ordenador" in Spain and "ordinateur" in French. Interesting that we moved forward to computer over the years.

[pjmlp]

As Portuguese reaching 50, that is also native speaker in Spanish as well, this is the very first time I have seen any Portuguese content using the Spanish/French variant, instead of "computador".

[jgrahamc]

Yeah, I found that too. But that's all I found.

[Animats]

The book has a picture of the IBM 2321 Data Cell Drive, 1964 to 1975.[1] That's an exotic peripheral for the original IBM System/360, a tape strip library. Before disks got big, there were various mechanical kludges to select storage media from a library and move them to a read/write unit. IBM had several such mechanical systems. This one was a commercial product with modest success.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_2321_Data_Cell

[rcarmo]

Look up a guy called Pedro Aniceto - he’ll tell you so many stories of when those cards were current here (he used to courier them across town when he was a kid)

[pedroaniceto]

;) Punching cards was in fact my first "decent" job. There were the "punchers" and "the programmers". A real social battle...

[anthk]

I love these old advertisements. BTW, even in late and mid 80's, there were adverts on the Spanish Reader's Digest on courses about computers. I rememember showing images of both PDP front panels and maybe Altair 8800, not IBM PC's. These were top notch stuff for big corporations and banks filling their offices.

BTW, on the 'computadora' term, these looked outdated, and to anyone non-Latin American descent here 'computadora' would mean an old IBM mainframe the size of two wardrobes and more.

[pantulis]

I remember those things being called "cerebros electrónicos".

[zahlman]

>indicates that João A. Fernandes is paid 15$000 (15 Portuguese escudos) per hour

From the linked Wikipedia article, the escudo was replaced with the Euro in 2002, at a rate of about 200 escudos to the Euro. Seems like they had quite a bit of inflation in those three or so decades.

[tumetab1]

I was intrigued by the value so did some research.

I would guess the 15$/hour value was chosen to approximate an average gross salary. The annualized payment would be 31200$[1] and it seems the average annual salary was around 30359$.

Updated to 2022 values the annual gross pay would be 10033€ [3], current average annual gross salary is 20483€ [4].

[1] 15$ * 2080 hours [2] https://www.repository.utl.pt/bitstream/10400.5/9819/1/ee-ja... [3] https://www.ine.pt/xportal/xmain?xpid=INE&xpgid=ipc&xlang=en [4] https://www.pordata.pt/pt/estatisticas/salarios-e-pensoes/sa...

[nunobrito]

15 escudos was roughly 7 cents of Euro in those days. You could buy one chewing gum with that kind of money. An expresso coffee would cost 50 escudos on the turn of the century.

[ajose_mr]

There was: https://www.inflationtool.com/rates/portugal/historical?utm_...

I have heard a few stories about those times in the 70s and 80s where people were selling their properties and putting the money in the bank which was paying 20% interest.

A bitter lesson on the difference between the nominal Vs real value of money rapidly ensued.

[zorked]

I didn't know they used to call computers "ordenadores" in Portugal. Interesting.

[pedroaniceto]

'till the 80's, french was the computer dominating language. Terms like "Octeto" (portuguese for byte) were derived from french glossary (tehy had laws to prevent the english tech term colonization and still today they have a french word for every english counterpart). So, "Ordenadores" was pretty common. And before electronics took over, we had "Electrológica", refering mixed hardware like Burroughs or Gestetner.

[forinti]

In Brazil the vocabulary changed a lot from the 80s onward too.

I was used to reading everything in English, so Brazilian computer books and magazines would always read strange to me. Then in the 90s everything just moved to American vocabulary.

The strangest word I recall in this context is the use of "alça" for handle.

[madaxe_again]

Ordinateur in French, still.

[hammock]

Spain and France as well. Computadora was a Latin American thing

[jgrahamc]

They appear to have in this book, but computadores seems to have taken over.

[pedroaniceto]

Those were the days...

[lubujackson]

My dad used to work in a college lab that used punch cards. I am actually using one as a bookmark right now - they make great bookmarks!

[toast0]

Blank, unpunched punchcards are a great size for taking notes too.

[cafard]

Very cool. Also good to see someone else still writing Perl.

[jgrahamc]

Mostly because I know it's installed, I can remember pretty much the entire language, and because I'd probably use Python instead but I've been bitten by some environment thing too many times.

[gpvos]

It still has great whipuptitude.

[svilen_dobrev]

so.. those real cards that fell off .by.gravity., were the originals photographed in the textbook?

[jgrahamc]

No, they were not the originals because if you look at the book versions they do not have the printed In Es Me logo on them.