
Punched Cards - li4ick
https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/punched-cards/2
======
dullroar
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. :)

~~~
JohnFen
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.

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jf
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/](http://ibm-1401.info/)

~~~
litoE
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.

~~~
imtringued
But isn't the idea the same? If you have explicit line numbers then you can
just load the cards in any order. No need to sort it.

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icedata
Another important market for IBM punch card technology during the 40's
[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/hitlers...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/hitlers-
willing-business-partners/303146/)

~~~
DerekL
Mentioned on page 9 of the article.

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nexuist
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.

~~~
ivan_ah
I came to say the same thing. Very interesting design indeed.

The titles appear onmousover for the "bookmarks" \-- although I don't think
the are bookmarks but stacks of punchcards.

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DonHopkins
Didn't the Lisp Machine have a graphical interactive punched card simulator?

~~~
cpr
[https://www.masswerk.at/keypunch/](https://www.masswerk.at/keypunch/)

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eesmith
Hmm, no mention of edge-notched punched cards -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge-
notched_card](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge-notched_card)

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ChuckMcM
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.

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gorgoiler
Oh wow what a huge amount of content. This is fantastic. Really nailing the
goal of being an online museum.

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woofyman
The joy of reading your card deck, having it compile and produce the correct
output, the very first time!

