TheBanyanTree: The State of My World as of Thursday Afternoon

[Peter Macinnis]

Julie Anna Teague wrote:

> I'm laughing at you calling yourself "old school".  Ok, 300 baud modems, 
> yes, that is considered old school, you little Gen X-er you.  But I 
> graduated from college in 1983 with a computer science degree, and talk 
> about old school--we still used punch cards.  We ran them through a very 
> large computer in the musty basement of an old building.  We flipped 
> switches, indicating octal codes, on the front of this computer to debug 
> our program.  And yes, damnitall, I walked a mile to school in the 
> snow!  How did you know that?

Latecomer!  Raise you five and see you.  Five-channel paper tape, me, 
using Baudot code -- that was 1963.  Three-ply double-quarto fanfold 
printout with carbon paper in between.  Designed for single use, a 
typist could get six carbon copies from a sheet of it, so all of us with 
typewriters used to take bundles home.  I tossed out the last of it 
three years back . . . the typewriter went twenty years ago, but I 
missed this carefully filed folder of used-once carbon paper.

BTW, I was still using punch cards to run major jobs until 1987 -- some 
of those cards were cut in 1966, and got used once a year to process the 
Higher School Certificate for the state.  The code was a mix of Fortran 
and Cobol -- it ran fine, and getting programmers to change things was 
getting harder, but they said it would cost us $250,000 to redo it.

For all I know, they are still using the same programs . . . and the 
same punch cards.

REAL programmers use COPY CON PROGRAM.EXE

peter

-- 

   _--|\     Peter Macinnis, science gossip and word herder
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  \.--._*<-- originator of the all-terrain penguin-drawn sled
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