
Programming with Punched Cards (2005) [pdf] - dmarchand90
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/fisk.pdf
======
ableal
_" So now I dug out my pad of coding forms and wrote one line on it, this time
including the missing comma. I took it back to Maria and asked her to make me
a new card."_

The luxuries of a pro ... (although further down the page he is using the
spare card punch machine himself.)

I met punched cards for an IBM 360 as a student - besides punching our own
cards, in a public room with a dozen machines clattering away, we needed a
"credit card" at the head of the deck. This was a pink-colored card (instead
of the run-of-the-mill cream) pre-punched with the number of CPU seconds
allowed for the job.

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082349872349872
On sorting dropped decks:

[http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/sorters.html](http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/sorters.html)

"You may have heard the story of the operator who dropped a whole box of
cards. Wanting to put things right as quickly as possible, he sorted the
cards, without consulting the user. As it turned out, that was the worst
possible response. Up until that point, the box had contained a sample of
random numbers."

(My father used to get his entropy from dead tree random number pools, similar
to:
[https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1418.html](https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1418.html)
)

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Item_Boring
At the university I worked at we were still using punched cards (both punched
and non-punched) to take written notes. When I left last year there was still
a room full of those. Crazy that to think that at some point people took the
decision to order huge amounts of these cards - maybe in the hopes that this
technology will last for quite a long time.

------
GnarfGnarf
I worked in the 70's as a professional programmer using punched "Hollerith"
cards. Some of this article is a bit off. You don't just start programming one
day. In those days you would take a two-week course at the vendor or at a
University.

You don't discover that you have to compile your program after you have
written it. You are taught that in advance.

The keypunch operator knew this was source code, and would never give you an
uninterpreted deck. That was only for data.

I maintained a 4,000+ card program. I used two special metal trays, with a tab
that pressed and locked in the cards securely. There was no "2,000-card"
limitation. The operators were trained to feed thousands of cards in the card
reader. Our master file was 40,000 cards, read through twice a day.

We used a binary image technique, allowing us to store 240 4-bit digits (3 x
80) per card.

