I used to be a chemistry major up until I saw that people taking third year chemistry (then) were carrying around boxes of punch cards. I had bought a hand-held calculator (not engineering style hp) and it was all the computing I wanted to do. So I became a lazy biology major and graduated with a BA in chemistry and a BS in biology. (lol) ________________________________ From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of Keith Lofstrom <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, September 21, 2021 3:19 PM To: [email protected] <[email protected]> Subject: [PLUG] Punch cards Re: Terabyte paper tape
On Tue, Sep 21, 2021 at 09:26:05AM -0700, Randy Bush wrote: > funny, i came in a different door; so used hollerith cards (1130, 1401, > 709x) and a lot of assembler before tape (pdps). Actually, I did have experiences with Hollerith cards earlier than PDP-8 paper-tape, but it was not with stored program electronic computers. My mother was attracted to teaching, but left West Texas Teacher's College during World War 2 to work at Douglas Aircraft near LA (office work, not rivets). Years later, She needed to work to pay for my sister's operations; my father's freelance architectural design income was not enough. Bookkeeping work for Beaverton School District central office was the best approximation of a teaching career that my mother could attain. One of her tasks was running the school district's Hollerith card sorter, which separated punch cards into bins using simple electro-mechanical logic (not even arithmetic). The "program" was entered with a banana-plug patch panel. These IBM machines were the descendants of the early machines that Hollerith designed for sorting the US census. A set of 80 character punch cards might have codes for a student's name (truncated), age, grade, school, neighborhood, and a few other signifiers. To find all the 1953-born students living in Central Beaverton, run big card decks through the card sorter a few times, and end up with a few cards that meet the criteria. Another line-printer-like machine read the text codes the cards and printed text on fanfold paper. Imagine sorting cards by age, or alphabetically, without even a binary arithmetic compare operation. It can be done with mental logic, and many sorting passes, and moving around a lot of card decks. Aided by the way Hollerith cards encoded letters and numbers. The sorting equipment was old, and might have been world war 2 surplus. Mom was smart, but not a geek. I helped her puzzle out the IBM manuals (she brought them home to read after work), and helped her plug the patch panel on weekends. I was ten years old or thereabouts. Does this make me the first member of "plug"? :-) Keith P.S. This was before a very dark year of my childhood, so some of those prior memories are suppressed or lost. In some ways, my life experiences begin at age 13. If others claim earlier Hollerith card experience than me, they are "psychologically" correct. I used punchcards with two different IBM 1130s after the PDP-8; I even managed to hang the PSU 1130 with a mis-punched Fortran card deck. But those stories come later. P.P.S. Programming can be fun, but analog integrated circuit design is AWESOME. -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected]
