My favorite OT theme. Related in my mind. The diameter of the original space shuttle booster rocket was an odd value determined as follows:
-- The booster was built in rural Utah -- To reach the eventual launch pad, it had to travel through a train tunnel -- The booster had to fit through the tunnel -- So the spacing of train tracks determined the booster's diameter -- The spacing of RR tracks was influenced by the spacing of ancient wagon wheels -- Wagon wheel spacing was influenced by the horses that once pulled them -- In other words, the diameter of the booster rocket derived from a horse's *ss -- QED? . . J.O.Skip Robinson Southern California Edison Company Electric Dragon Team Paddler SHARE MVS Program Co-Manager 323-715-0595 Mobile 626-543-6132 Office ⇐=== NEW robin...@sce.com -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> On Behalf Of Charles Mills Sent: Tuesday, June 2, 2020 2:31 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: (External):Re: Punched cards and character set CAUTION EXTERNAL EMAIL "Laced" (every hold punched) cards were an amusing bulletin board item. And yes, I believe I heard at the time @Jesse's premise as to why 'S' did not use row 1. Actually, the alpha codes are as follow: A - I, row 12 plus rows 1 - 9 J - R, row 11 plus rows 1 - 9 S - Z, row 0 plus rows 2 - 9 So you see that if S used row 1 it would have had two adjacent rows punched, 0 and 1. (The rows, from top to bottom, are 12, 11, 0 - 9.) Non-alphanumeric punches were fairly rare, and column binary was extremely rare. Object code decks of course contained non-alphanumeric punches. The X'02' that begins each (traditional) object code record, preceding ESD, TXT, RLD or END? I still think of it as "12-2-9.") Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Steve Smith Sent: Tuesday, June 2, 2020 2:07 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: Punched cards and character set That's plausible, I think. While there are plenty of adjacent punches in the full 256-characters, I'm sure most cards were mostly alphanumeric only, and it might pay to make them as strong as possible. I remember seeing some cards that were punched in every position; those were very delicate, and definitely couldn't survive a pass through a card reader, regardless of the fact they had no validity at all. sas On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 4:55 PM Jesse 1 Robinson <jesse1.robin...@sce.com> wrote: > I haven't seen this mentioned. The punch card codes for letters went > like > this: > > A - I rows 1 - 9 > J - R rows 1 - 9 > S - Z rows 2 - 9 > > So why was S assigned to row 2 instead of row 1? The answer I was > taught was that row 1 was too close to an adjacent location. The > punching/reading devices and card stock of the day could not reliably > handle punches that close together, so row 1 was skipped for the third > alphabetic sequence. > > What's amusing is that this pattern was carried over to EBCDIC. The > code for S likewise skips a possible combination: D9 to E2; 'E1' is > not assigned to an alphabetic character. > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
