Slashdot Mirror
When PC Still Means 'Punch Card'
ricst writes: "The New York Times reports that there are stll many applications that use punchcards. "Use what?", you say. Slashdotters not yet in their dotage may have never seen these 80 column Hollerith field cards, or the clunky machines that are still used to punch holes in them. And let's not forget the bizarre JCL (Job Control Language) that's needed to be at the front of the deck. Well... turns out many companies still use them, with slight modifications (like the airlines that print a magnetic strip on them)."
after enough holes get punched in your card you get a free sandwich, right?
It's before my time, but I've been regaled in the tales of horror that programming in languages like Fortran resulted in. Miss a hole here, miss your job there... Back then programs were literally full of holes, and now they're only figuratively full with holes...I suppose that's an improvement?
"Perception is reality." -unknown
As a friend asked me recently, I wonder how many applications could cope with someone named "//SYSIN DD *"
heh,
.net interpreter can handle punch cards along with the 87 other languages it claims to be able to compile
/me wonders if the
...that there are stll many applications that use punchcards.
Like the state-of-art US ellection system...
the magnetic card my university gave me?
;))
It's really the same principle. I carry around a data representation of who I am, and to verify it, they swipe my data through a little machine before they let me eat, etc. Most of the time, they don't check the face, don't counter-check the name, don't do anything. In fact, I could go eat as most other white males (they'd probably notice if I gave them an african american girl's card, they aren't THAT slow.
But really, what's so different? We haven't moved to a much better system yet, even though fingerprint ID is readily and widely available, wouldn't require me to carry around an ID card, and wouldn't require the lady who has to swipe my card for me (really, a silly expense for the university).
Just seems like "modernization" needs to happen in concept as well as "tech", and that it isn't.
I often see punchcards being used as keys to hotel rooms. Does that count?
For crying out loud, I suppose we have to hear all those worn out chad jokes all over again.
Never underestimate the power of fiber.
Technologies, in society, operate on a gradient. The old ones are usually retained until they fall apart, and the new ones are acquired when it's forced upon a business or an individual (usually because everybody else has acquired a new tech, and it's incompatible with the old).
There are vested interests in old technologies, too. That's why an airport, who's been subcontracting to an old-skewl tech company for years, may have a new iteration of punchcard tech.
In Africa, for example, the old Datsuns and 286's we throw away are put to good use, and repaired until they fall apart. Most people, there and here, see technology as a necessary evil, not a blessing. They would hate to spend money on, and waste time learning, something new just for its own sake!
Only a truly myopic perspective - that which worships the new for the newness, and hence also worships the old for its oldness, would consider the use of Punchcards something slash-worthy. I wish there were more perspective on these issues.
Goat sex free since 2001
At least in the automotive engineering field, punchcards and Fortran seem to still be going strong. I remember when I got my ME degree in the early nineties, we had photocopies in our handouts of the punchcards used to calculate flame propagation for combustion engine design. Interestingly, the programs companies and researches use for these calculations are written in Fortan.
The only certainty is entropy.
In the electromechanical tabulator era, long before electronic computers, IBM locked up Herman Hollerith's patents on the punch card. This deprived competitors of access to the medium in which the vast majority of machine-processed documents were originated and maintained. Remington Rand, which acquired the UNIVAC computer family from the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, had a well-established line of tabulating machinery that dodged the IBM Hollerith patents by using 90 column cards with round holes, punched by mechanical punches that punched the entire card at once (and hence allowed correction of errors before the card was punched, unlike IBM gear where one quickly learned, "You can't erase a hole".) Once UNIVAC obtained patents on the key technologies of electronic computing, they were able to license these patents to IBM in return for the rights to the 80 column Hollerith card (which, in retrospect, was not a terribly good idea, strategically speaking), and the Hollerith card became the mainstream input medium for UNIVAC computers.
But if you've designed your whole corporate data processing system around 90 character records, it's very difficult to just lop off the last 10. Early adopters of Remington Rand tabulators and UNIVAC computers continued to soldier along with 90 column cards well into the 1970's. Here's an example I punched in 1972 on a 1930's vintage Remington Rand keypunch while I was employed at Vickers division of Sperry Rand in Troy, Michigan, in the United States.
Let's face it -- there are some times when cheap and portable is what matters, and low density just doesn't matter. Whether or not at that point you use puched paper, bar codes or magnetic strips is mostly just a matter of your application. Personally I suspect that bar codes is actually the main competitor to punch cards in this application, because they can be produced on standard laser printers (a fairly new development, mind you), however punch cards do have one major advantage over bar codes or magstrips: it's probably the less fragile of the three.
I always found the punch card stories my professors told to be about as enthralling as the "I walked through snow barefoot up hills, both ways" stories my grand daddy told me.
Both are of equal value. (ie, whine = whine)
The Generation
I'd say something witty here, but I'm not that bright.
Until fairly recently (3 years ago) at a VAX shop I worked at, they used VMS software that emulated an IBM RJE (look it up) station for transmission of financial transactions to a bank. Each record in the file that was sent appeared to the IBM mainframe to be a punch card. I had to write a DCL routine to create the JCL that launched the program remotely on the mainframe.
Banks are always the last institutions to adopt new technologies.
Inominate Recreant - 22 years in the code biz.
GO SYSIN DD *
doo-dah, doo-dah...
What's cool about punch cards (my gf's mother, a former programmer at an insurance co gave me a brick a while back) is that you can actually see the bits and bytes in a much more concrete way than the way we abstractly understand them today. Coding used to, it seems to me, be a much more vicseral, "real" thing than what it is today. (Especially in the big metal days when a byte of memory took up about a square foot in the machine).
slashdotters not yet in their dotage may have never seen these 80 column Hollerith field cards
Hell, seems like most Slashdotters don't remember the heady days of the 486 any more, let alone punch cards.
"You mean computers used to have just a command line? Not even Windows 95?"
--saint
(I know, I know, troll. Fuck off.)
I'm always saying I wish I could program punchcards. I think this day and age is bloody incredible... The technology involved in a mere hard drive is simply mind-blowing. But still, somehow, I feel a little bit cheated by not living "back in the day". I've had some great learning experiences thanks to being alive when I am, but I still wish I could program on punch cards once or twice just to say I've done it. I still wish I'd been around to code a 6502 blitter for my computer in asm. I tinker with some embedded programming (with the IU Robotics Club), so this stuff is incredibly cool to me. Anyway, sorry for my waxing nostalgic about things I never experienced, I don't feel like registering to read the article, and my browser doesn't seem to like the page anyway. But it's kinda like.... it would be cool to live in Medieval times (alchemy, knights, people saying "Ni! Ni!"..), provided I wouldn't have to give up my indoor plumbing and cable modem. Or something.
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
If you're in college/university, you could use some of this stuff for a prank. If you load it into a vaccum cleaner, you can put the machine in reverse and shoot the bits of card under a person's door.
The best part is that the chad will be charged with static electricity as they go through the vaccum hose so they will stick to everything and be hard to clean.
Apu used them to create the first computerized tic-tac-toe game.
So there.
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
Hollerith cards are ~80 yrs old, the stored program computer is > 50 yrs old, the Internet is > 30 years old, the PC is > 25 years old, and all the important user-interface functions we now use (windows, icons, mouse, pointer) were demonstrated in 1968 by Doug Englebart (http://www.bootstrap.org/).
I used to hate the comment that "I don't know what progamming language I'll be writing in 20 years, but I know it will be called FORTRAN". Now I see the (only slightly inprecise) wisdom in it. You would probably be bored by my stories about entering PDP-11 code on the console switches in octal, but there is a lesson in there somewhere.
The message is: real change takes a long time -- one or two human generations. Overnight sensations and revolutions are usually many years in the making. Don't respect yer elders, but at least know what we did wrong. Andy Warhol said: "They say time changes things, but actually you have to change them yourself".
End of Sermon
mcg
SuperID
Given temp and humidity control the program stored on punch cards will withstand almost any assault including thermonuclear EMP. That's why paper tape is still the program storage method for some really critical systems. It is very hard to erase a punched hole.
well, maybe the punchcards would be harder, but programming older cpu-s is actually quite usefull.
Personally I like my ti-calculator with a z80 (I know I should have a HP, go away)
Also there are people haiving competitions (robo-sumo anyone) with micro-programmable cpu's.
I write software for the government that users a spec called milstrip.
Altough we don't print out cards, transactions between government/military systems still use 80 character long messages (or milstrip).
The milstrip spec is actually quite useful, and complex.
Although they are based on a legacy format, 80 character based systems have had an incredible amount of time to mature.
Replacing them all with more recent fromats (ie XML) would really give no return on investment.
You would probably be bored by my stories about entering PDP-11 code on the console switches in octal, but there is a lesson in there somewhere.
Yes. No.
Wired magazine talked about this a while ago. The archived article is here
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
This reminds me of my Air Force days, when I heard many stories of how the Data Center admins would bring in a large bag of chad and dump it on the table in front of the new guy. They would make him sort it into Classified and Unclassified piles, with the Classified chad being anything with a marking on it. After several hours of tedious work, someone would run by and the breeze would mix it all back together on the table, making the poor Airman do it all over...
I was told that very few realized that they could just treat it *all* as Classified, and burn it. Heh.
Karma: Marginal (mostly due to the border around the website)
http://www.tno.nl/instit/fel/museum/computer/en/pu nchcards.html
A History on the technology.
Can't believe I didn't see this link: Free Punch Cards. I especially love the graphical punch your own card.
Fortran programmer...oh yeah. Array math for life!
all your punch card needs:
http://www.cardamation.com/
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
We had stacks of them in the lab I used to work in.
We called them "incremental height adjusters".
Very useful.
I remember decoding punch cards by hand when I was in Kindergarten in the late 1960's. My father was in the military, and we lived on an army base in Germany. He would bring home from work stacks of old punch cards for me. It was simple - one column for each digit and letter. I remember it was kind of cool how people's names and other recognizable words would emerge from the holes on the cards.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
If you got one of those lego tape loaders, and modified it to load punch cards into a reader, you could make it bahave a bit like a file system (should be quite easy to do on linux). Mount that file system and set it as apache's document root, and hey presto
;>
The Worlds First Punch Card Powered Webserver!!!
You could probably do it with IIS too, but I don't know if it could keep up with the pace
Jimadilo
'... I was here, you just didn't see me.'
In college, in, oh, 1995, we had some COBOL classes. And the IBM COBOL interpreter we used had the column constraints; it considered text input to be a virtual punch card; various COBOL bits had to be in various columns, or it would not compute. The VAX compiler, fortunately, didn't have such constraints. But the teacher, who was 65+, kept a whack of card sheets, which he'd photocopy and hand out, and require at least one assignment done on.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Please don't feed the trolls.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Interesting book BTW.
-- SIGFPE
I was in the last class at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to use punched cards to submit our programs. I've always thought it was kind of neat that I had a taste of that technology.
At the time, I really resented having to learn how to use a card punch. I eventually learned that you could sneak into the lab in the next room, and use a text editor on a 24 line by 80 character terminal to create your program, and then have the program punched by an automated card punch. Then, you took the cards back, and inserted them into the card reader.
We had a certain amount of credit in our accounts, and when it ran out, that was it. No more runs. Yes, we did much more careful desk checking "back in the day".
You are a new type of moron. If you have a problem with geeks, then maybe you should stay away from geek SITES you stupid stupid fuck.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Then why don't you find a new line of work?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I remember writing scripts for SAS, the stat package. To get your data read in you wrote "cards;". I always thought it was a bit of a bizarre statement till the professor explained it--they used the punch cards to store data on the original version and cards let the program know the data was ready to be read.
...
Considering the size of some of my datasets I'd hate to have to do the punching. I thought data entry was bad
I forget...are we at war with Eurasia or East Asia?
One of the advantages of JCL was you could put a few cards at the front of your deck that said "please do a warm boot" so someone couldn't run a program before you that caused all subesquent programs to be read as data an print mindless gibberish as the "output".
Nest week: Switching the run and parity error light covers on an 1130 for fun and profit.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
That didn't last long, of course. The bank introduced a new kind of card, with a magnetic strip. You got the card back at the end of the transaction, and you could use it to ask for your balance or order a statement. Using a weird display system based on printed questions on cloth scrolled across rollers controlled by a stepper motor.
Gerald Ford was the President of the USA.
I work with cross tab programs and the data file is represented in the way of a punchcard. The data entry program works like if you are punching a card from a keyboard it even tells you the column number.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Back in 1987, in my first year CS program at the U of Alberta, I remember vividly the instant I deciphered the cumbersome learned-by-rote commands used to deliver our PASCAL programming assignments to the compiler... Virtual punch card decks... It wasn't long after that that they finally retired the MTS system and the Amdahl it was running on in favour of some Unix boxes. Gaah. MTS...evil evil evil.
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Remember, with Open Source, you can re-write the code on anything. Imagine the possibilities.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Actuallly, punch cards are much older than 80 years. They were developed to tabulate the data for the 1890 census by Herman Hollerith (as in the hollerith code field(s) used in FORTRAN).
Another interesting fact - the cards are the size of a dollar bill. You don't think so? They are much larger? Punch cards are the size of an 1890 dollar bill.
At my College we still learn RPG and COBOL in computer programming, languages very much based on punch cards. We are "lucky" enough, though, to have an AS/400 minicomputer to log into that supports 5250 emulation, so we only have to live with the effects of programming in a punch card language.
Unfortunately I've never actually been shown a punch card, making RPGs very strange limitations and stringent requirements all that much more frustrating.
I can remember walking into the punch card room at Ohio State University around 1980. There were many of these rooms about the campus. Punch cards were on there way out then, and big (10 inch) floppy disks were the new thing. I still have my original 10 inch floppy - the new technology of the time. I can remember typing punch cards over and over as I made typing mistakes. There is no white out or a delete key with punch cards or a punch card machine. Mistyped punch cards commonly littered the floor of every punch card room. Maybe this is where the saying "dumped on the floor" came from. One of the worst fears was that someone might bump you or you might trip while going down the steps and your cards get scattered everywhere. I can also remember standing in line waiting to feed my cards into the card hopper. I can also remember living in the "Ross Tower" on or about the 20th floor and dumping the cards out the window and watching them flutter out the window during the end of quarter celebrations. :)
Yup, that's right. They made me take it. And man, did it ever suck. I'm all for a well rounded education with courses that teach fundamentals, no matter how old they are, but common!
The first half of the year was very, very interesting. It taught us about old school mainframes; hardware like tape drives and dasd, but it seems like the course director ran out of ideas because half way thru, they made us learn JCL.
Being a telecom program, and having the luxury of hindsight, I think our time would have been better spent in other places. However, I don't work for a bank or for an airline, maybe those graduates are grateful for JCL. Me, I hate the stupid language and pity anyone who is still forced to use it.
rejected (19) accepted (0)
Is there a psychological term related to getting your stories rejected on slashdot?
What about smart chips? I believe those are a pretty good, too. (Data is stored in static RAM)
I've put one through the wash and run it over a magnet. No effect. Plus, they can store a little more than any of the other things you've mentioned (and they are cheap, too).
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
It feels kinda strange to walk around with a pre-historic computer era relic in my wallet...
Being in charge of parts, and typically the one tasked to research maintenance, I became all too familiar with these cards. Never saw the data on the punchcards used for anything as we pulled them by hand, just by looking at the index number printed on the top. I suspect that coming out of overhaul the entire batch was run, with updated plans substituted, and sorted. By the time I earned my dolphins and started using them, it was about 2 yrs. after the overhaul so finding what the card I needed was frustrating at times.
My boat was decommissioned shortly after I became a civilian again, but I imagine that others still use them...
Oh yah, I had a full course in COBOL too!
Anyone hiring a recent grad with somewhat outdated skills and holding a lot of contempt for a college that took all my money?
rejected (19) accepted (0)
Is there a psychological term related to getting your stories rejected on slashdot?
I work for Logistics Information and as a part of our job is to track past and present government contracts via RFQ, NSSN, and Cage codes. Some of them have been archived in Punch cards with embedded microfiche with Hollerith data. We read them in with an Aperture Card Read from Contex which cost a pretty penny. 12 Grand to be exact and very time consuming. Try 70 cards an hour. Now imagine a couple of cabinets filled with those little cards. We are currently trying to take all that data off the cards and put online, but takes forever to do. These probably were most effecient at the time they were used, but now there is a real push to get these in another format for easier archival purposes. My recommendation to anyone wishing to continue this fine tradition of making these cards... it is more effecient and less costly to go with another method, but if you insist on doing so... at least PUNCH them. I've run across thousands of cards that has great fiche data on it, but no Hollerith data on it at all. It one thing when your machine can't read the data, its quite another when there is NO data. Guess I'll go back to the machine and feed it another 70 cards and pray it doesn't eat them.
... when we had to carve our own PCs out of wood!
In my high school (this was in 1972 for you young whipper-snappers) we had an IBM-1620. In our programming class, we used Fortran-2D and punch cards. I wrote a random-word generator that ran the poor old 1620 out of memory!
It was a Big Deal when we got a paper-tape reader to load the operating system with. Only took 10 minutes to boot instead of half an hour.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The '//SYSIN DD *' flags the following lines as "in-stream" control statements. These control statements provide the ability to modify the default execution of the program as called on the previous EXEC statement.
It's been less than six hours since I've fscked around with JCL :)
My grand daddy use to tell me stories about living in a shoe box in the middle the road ...
Well, ain't that cute, they both are paper, and contain data, so they must be primitive, basic, and completely outdated, huh?
I got started on an IBM 1170 in the early 1970s. I was in high school and I had just read - a GREAT sci-fi novel that is all but forgotten today and has been out of print for a while. Anyway, my first punchcard program was a FORTRAN program to calculate time dilation factors for relativistic space flights like the ill-fated Leonora Christine. We were landing on the moon and even kids like me from rural Tennessee were getting on real computers and figuring out the jump to light speed. Heady times. The punch card decks even smelled good.
And BTW, to the AC that's been modded down to -1, I'm hardcore enough to have a 5 digit slashdot ID...
"It might have been the Chad..."
*Splash*
You are correct. SYSIN is not used for program dumps. Those DD statements are generally SYSUDUMP or SYSMDUMP depending on whether you want a formatted or machine dump. SYSIN is used for specifying data input parameters.
Hmmmm.. I meant to say, I had just read Tau Zero, a GREAT sci-fi novel...
can you imagine a beowulf cluster fo these puppies!?!
(sorry -- had to do it. One of those Friday night things...)
As the trolls would say, "Carpe Dium!"
"Old man yells at systemd"
I mean, anyone who relates to this story is probably in bed asleep already. ;)
Who says you can't use punch cards today? Try the Virtual Punchcard Server.
Actually, I think they'd say "Carpe Diem" .. but whats the diff, trolls were never known for their broad liberal educations anyhow ... ;)
"Old man yells at systemd"
...you'll get a little piece of cardboard with some holes. This is a transfer, which you feed to a machine in the Metro to let you in.
was a deck of punch cards. Just rip up the offending lines and key up new ones.
Not only that, but cards were a great vendor
neutral medium of data exchage. Punch an EBCDIC
deck, and any vendor could deal with that at the
time.
We old farts get insomnia. Makes for some rippin' wee hours coding marathons!
I keep the machines working in a public school district and walked in some kids playing a ShockWave game. The game was a tank game with green vector graphics and even had the volcano on the horizon. Of course, it had a lot of so called innovations like powerups but they looked at me quizically when I said, "Hey this is basically BattleZone." They were members of the school's geek squad too. Kids these days :-).
In the mid 1970's, IBM finally introduced a keypunch that could actually remember an entire card of characters and had a backspace key and didn't punch the holes until you were sure that the card was correct. It was a godsend of sorts. Of course, many cards with errors were actually used intentionally. The errors were commented out.
There were 256 characters in the IBM EBCDIC character set, but no where near that many keys on a keypunch. Yet all the characters could be punched. You had to hold the card firmly in position so that it wouldn't advance to the next column when a key was pressed. Then, by overpunching multiple characters or digits, any of the 256 characters could be encoded. However, there are 4096 possible ways to punch a column of a card, so many invalid characters could also be punched. Abend!
Perhaps the greatest trick of the punchcard era was the trick of tossing a deck of cards, say a program that had to stay in order, across the room with no rubber band around it. There was a technique for doing this so that the deck would fly across the room in one piece. This required skillfully sliding the top and bottom cards off the deck as it was released into flight. Not for the timid.
The tab card equipment for computing from the cards was equally awesome. There were relatively simple machines that could add and subtract and print reports. These were programmed with plugboard where wires were inserted to connect input card positions to output ptint positions. But the real wonder was the calculating card punch that could multiply. When this thing was on, not only did the whole room warm up, the next room warmed up, too. Must have drawn about 10kw for all the firebottles.
.. was when I sent my card deck through a broken card reader.
I had stacked the cards into the shiny metal hopper and pressed the READ button. The reader quickly slid the card after card from the bottom of the deck, shot it through the reading unit and then just as quickly sent the cards to the output bin. Unfortunately, the output bin was broken. So rather than deposit my cards in a neat pile, my 500 cards were launched clear across the room. I could only watch in horor as they covered every flat surface like oversized confetti.
I think I spent the next hour re-sorting the deck. Gee, I miss those punch cards.
A project currently underway with my employers is to take data from a web input form and use it in a batch program on the mainframe. The web server runs under UNIX System Services. Java applications have been written to parse the input data, reformat it, and to pass that data to the OS/390 batch JCL.
I don't know a whole lot about the Java side of things -- I'm responsible for the UNIX System Services and OS/390 system environment.
I guess what I'm saying is I don't seem to have this blood loss problem.
...well, at least as implemented in OS/360 and its descendants: device-independent I/O. The point of all of that was that you could redirect your program's input or output to any dataset (file, in modern terms for anyone who's not a mainframer), be it on tape, disk, card (reader or punch, as appropriate), or printer. This was NOT a Unix invention: OS/360 had it in the late 60s. (Other OSes may well have had it before that). The statement
//SYSIN DD *
is the same idea as the Unix < redirection operator. To change that input to a different dataset, all you had to do was change that one JCL statement; no program changes were needed.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
oops.. did i put that in the middle of your deck?
sorrrry!
I remember being a kind in the early 70's and my dad bringing home cards from f'd up programs for some manufacturing company he worked for...They were freaking space-age stuff to me. Growing up on those warped me enough so now I have hobbies like "Collecting NeXT cubes"...
"I don't mind the swelling, it's the itching I could do without."
I wonder what I can get for an old IBM punch card machine that I remember from when I was a kid... BTW I'm 21 and this IBM was still being used from the days it was made in the second world war... You wonder if anything will ever have a useful lifespan like that again.
All programs on the as400 are still read in from a virtual puch card reader. Just as all output from programs on said machines goes out to virtual printers (even the display of gui apps)
It's always good when these kind of thiungs come up on /.
Point being: always come into contact with as many forms of tech you can get your hands on. It not only makes you realise where the jargon/traditions come rfrom, but it also makes you more likely to think outside the box, if you know where the box comes from and why it was created in that way.
We weren't allowed to mess with the plugboard, only with the paper tape and the keypunches, so our programming mainly consisted of mapping fields between punchcard columns and the printout based on what the current plugboard did, programming keypunch drums to make it easier to get the right inputs into the card fields, and finding creative ways to use the card sorter to get the information we wanted while minimizing the number of times you ran the deck of data cards through the sorter. (That wasn't just because it's cool to be algorithmically efficient - it was primarily because if you put 1000 punch cards into the sorter, you'd usually get about 998-999 of them back intact and have to dig the pieces of the torn ones out of the mechanism and then retype them :-)
A punch card sorter is an interesting beast on its own. It's basically a stable bucket sort - you pick what card column to sort on, and it sorts the cards into bins based on the letter or number in that column of the card. So to sort a deck of cards alphabetically based on a given field, you'd sort them by the last column in the field, restack into one deck, sort by the n-1th column, restack,
My next computer after that was in high school - a PDP-11 running RSTS-11 and BASIC that we accessed by timesharing on an ASR-33 teletype, complete with paper-tape. Then the first couple years of college were a step back into punchcard-land, though at least there was a mainframe behind it and not just a mechanical smart-printer. *It* finally had JCL, which was rabidly lame after using the PDP-11s :-)
It was a couple of years before I got back to terminals (whew! VM/CMS!) And the summer job with an IBM System/34 (48K of RAM and a disk drive and an operating system that was a dim ancestor of the AS/400). And then there was the Plato nationwide computer system, which had graphics terminals with a "notesfiles" system that later influenced Usenet and had really cool spacewar games. And then in grad school there was Unix and microcomputers running APL and all sorts of cool stuff. And then I used mainframes again, but seldom with punchcards, then Unix again for a couple of decades. Eventually I used this MS-DOS thing - it wasn't as primitive as JCL - looked more like VMS without the HELP system or any of the useful commands, which felt enough like RSTS-11 to wade around in.... And eventually there was Windows, which was sort of like a Macintosh implemented really badly on an unreliable operating system that didn't have enough resources and had applications that all worked differently and couldn't operate with each other, so there was none of the friendliness and knowing-what-to-do-ness of the Mac and none of the ease of use or power of Unix shell pipes and scripts. But at least it didn't feel like JCL.
/*END
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
However, there was one odd use I eventually found for the punched cards. I didn't always behave myself (sent nasty messages to other users, played super Startrek way too much) on the old York time sharing APL system at my university and would be punished by the operator by having my account "superlocked", that is, my accounts password would changed to 8 carriage return characters, which of course made it impossible to login from a terminal. However, good old York APL could actually accept APL programs on punched cards. Yes, it was a bitch to punch APL programs on cards but I found that with crafty keypunching you could code the 8 carriage return characters (EBCDIC X'15') on the York APL login card and thus successfully submit a job, the last line of which would be ")OFF:newpassword" to change the logon password to whatever I wanted. I was never superlocked out again for for than a few minutes.
Ok, so go ahead and laugh ...
Does it really make a difference what languages you were taught in college? Learning a new programming language once you already know how to program is so easy a tech-savvy high schooler can do it in a weekend. Getting a CS degree for anything but the math and theoretical stuff is pretty silly.
true 'dat O.G.,
true 'dat...
We still have 25+ year old code that is still in production This code was converted from punch card code. When I say converted I mean recompile with no changes. Indicators are evil. Taking a 1, 2 or 3 on rpg 2 code reeks nastiness. Were cleaning up for hours after one of these babies has a fit.
And now RPG can do the same things that C can. Altough the thought really does scare me.
Actually, the cool new punchcard systems were the ones with the 96-character mini-cards, about 1/3 the size of the Hollerith 80-columns.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
ok, enough of me stating the obvious
"we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!" --Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
1) Yes.
2) Yes.
By call a sage, are fictions, That which is hidden and you'll live in the Mahayana, with reason I've turned from black, how does nothing; to remember the senses by Buddhas. But don't worry about this follows means of form and hell. Yet each other shore. By overcoming the mind instruction and receives no other, shore: or materialists or rock walls. And unspoken agreement with an empty; neither exists and if he suffers in vain: and the Dharma, such instruction you'll be obstructed. You'll remain will: they attain on reality will bear its place of awareness.
But to subduing the breath.
Brought to you by dadadodo.
[2F22]
Abe: [seated nearby] Aw, some things never change.
Milhouse: Hey, everybody. An old man's talking!
Here's a pic of the machine that read them: card reader (the massive thing in the foreground). And, a keypunch, with cabinets for punch cards off to the right; and my favorite pic from the era, the DEC-10 in the dark (a long exposure). Used to turn the lights out and watch those register indicators or whatever they were.
When I went away to college I signed right up for the intro progamming class. Then I was hit with the cold reality of standing in line to enter my program into a punch card puncher, then standing in line to run the cards through a validator, then standing in line to put my program into the system and then waiting for hours, or going home and then back to the Computer Center, often several times, to get the output.
All this left me with a "Computing Sux" impression. It wasn't until I discoverd the rapidly exploding internet that I felt that initial engagement with the world of programming and computers in general again.Now I have an MA in history that I'm not using, but enjoying my current job writing things in perl,php and shell.
JM
Oink, Oink!!
We don't use punchcards where I work, but we do use JCL
my school's ACM chapter was on a tour of the local gas company's computer center. scattered among the big iron and other things was a single, orphaned IBM keypunch machine (sorry, don't remember the exact model). the tour guide, a 20+ year data processing guy, asked if anyone knew what it was.
I knew what it was; the only other person in the group who recognized it was the CS department chair, who was in his 60's at the time. talk about making a 29 year old feel old... sheesh!
Karma only matters to me now and zen.
Aperture cards may seem an appallingly hokey kluge today, and they also did back when they were still current technology, but they really *were* amazingly practical. A 747 can't even *hold* the blueprints it takes to describe and manufacture itself if they're printed on dead trees, much less take off carrying them. But if you put the stuff on microfilm, you've got millions of little pieces of film that there's no way to manage effectively. Aperture cards gave you a way to manage and automate handling the film so that you could tell what was on an image without sticking the thing on a microfilm reader. That made it possible to open-source an airplane, because you could actually deliver all the information about the plane along with the plane itself. That's not strictly true - a fighter plane might not have cargo space even for the aperture cards. But the important problem was that every airplane was different, so you needed the prints to be able to do repairs or make replacement parts. Not just every model of plane, but every individual large airplane, because the mechanical systems, electrical systems, instrumentation, and even body parts were constantly being revised, and the building time for a 747 or a complex military plane was longer than the design cycles. Lots of parts also stayed the same across multiple planes, and you'd want to be able to produce multiple spares, but since every plane was different, it needed its data with it. And computers weren't big enough.
Back in the mid-late 80s I worked on a project that scanned aperture cards to translate them into computer media, because computers were starting to be able to manage that volume of data. The system had to read the Hollerith codes on the card, which were an index that said what the picture was, and then do a high-resolution scan of the image on the film onto a bitmap file, hand it to an raster-to-vector converter that attempted to extract line-drawings and text from the thing into a CAD/CAM data format, and store all the data in an optical jukebox - gigabytes were still pretty big back then
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The 9-track magnetic tape technology let you write-protect or write-enable tapes by inserting or removing a plastic ring that the tape-readers checked for before writing. There were usually lots of spare write-rings around any computer shop, because you'd remove them from backup tapes you were archiving so nobody'd overwrite them. They were great toys for little kids (good to grab or chew on), and also made good cat-toys.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yes, I didn't have the "opportunity" to use punch cards... [Groan] You could all see the "old" timer story coming couldn't you...
My prof in university told me of his first programming job. A payroll system. They didn't have a computer system yet, so they diagrammed and setup the program on punch cards. Then they took the completed program (punch-cards) and bought some spare time on another machine. After feeding the punch cards, the program ran correctly tbe first time!
Sheesh, and I ues a compiler as a syntax checker. When was the last time you got anything more complex than "hello world" to compile and run correctly the first time. (Ok, I'm a sucky programmer [grin]) But never the less, program design was a whole lot more rigerous then!
Thems were the days!
Cheers!
Apu: "Here is the most intelligent tic-tac-toe game ever made!" <holding a
box of punch cards>
Bart: "What does....THIS card do?" <pulls one out>
Apu: "Oh, well." <throws box over his shoulder>
:)
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I just lost my JCL/IBM mainframe job today!!!!
People seriously, stay the fuck away from JCL, it sucks, it's for companyies that are stuck in 1971.
Don't let people tell you that it's useful... it's not.
In the NYT article, it states:
"Although data in many different formats was encoded on punch cards over the years, much was encoded in the standard Ascii text format and can easily be transferred to modern computer files with the right equipment."
Maybe I was hanging out with the wrong people in my youth, but all the punchcards I pounded out were EBCDIC.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
The trick was to manage the accounts so that by the end of the semester, when crunch time came, you had a few accounts left that had at least a few cents credit in them, so you could exploit the Big Debugging Run Hack. Because the accounting system checked your balance when you started your batch job, to see if you had money and permissions that you needed, and debited the account at the end of the run, if you had any money left in it, your job could run as long as it wanted and print out as much output as you wanted as long as it could avoid crashing, leaving a negative balance if you overran it. So the desperation mov e you'd save for the big project was to get it mostly running but still containing the last few nasty bugs you hadn't been able to find, so you'd turn on all the gory debugging print statements around the sections you were having trouble with and burn a low-balance account. Then you'd take the reams of paper, spread it all over a table with different colored highlighters, and you and your project team would go hunt through and find the bugs, clean up anything else you needed for the hopefully final production run, and go run it from the real account. Hopefully that would work, or if it failed, then hopefully you had a few cents left in the account to do another run.
Later, at Bell Labs, I became a TSO wizard and could do interactive compilation and debugging - much nicer than batch. And we had Unix on PDPs and Vaxen, and then they got Unix running on the mainframe - while it was still in beta, I could do my development on a Vax with 40 other users, or on a mainframe that had a couple clunky things but gave me 10 WHOLE MIPS of horsepower to compile with
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
When I was a student at Ga Tech in 1970, I was crossing campus on a cold rainy day when I saw a scampering lizard trip on the curb attempting to cross the street. His deck of punch cards went everywhere and he began to pick them up and then sat down and began crying - it was the week before finals and this had to be his final project.
I swore right then that if Comp Sci could do that to a man, it was evil and I would have nothing to do with computers.
Funny how things turn out, what with my being a sysadmin nowadays and all. I least I've stopped wanting to touch myself when someone loses all their data and calls pleading for help.
I knew the 5.25" floppy came from a cocktail napkin (8" floppies were too big they said, while talking at a bar), and likely the 3.5" disks came from those thingies that Kirk and Spock kept sticking into their consoles (alien pr0n?)
Anyone out there will to 'fess up to adding a GOTO command at the end of every card pointing to the next card.
It was really cool! You could shuffle the deck, and the program would still run just fine...
Now here's an interesting bit of history relating to IBM, punchcards, and the Holocaust:
IBM USA knew that its Hollerith machines were needed and used in concentration camps. IBM USA kept careful records of where its leased property was located and played an active role in servicing these machines, training its clients how to use them, and providing punch cards and other supplies. IBM USA's inventories of 1940 and 1941 indicate that the company knew which Hollerith machines were located in camps, along with their serial numbers and the amount they were being paid for the lease of each machine. At Dachau alone there were approximately 24 IBM sorters, tabulators and printers.
For more info, look here. The link is to a piece of commentary dated 2/19/01 posted on the site of a law firm specializing in class action law.
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
Actuallly, punch cards are much older than 80 years. They were developed to tabulate the data for the 1890 census by Herman Hollerith (as in the hollerith code field(s) used in FORTRAN).
They're older than that. HOLLERITH Punch cards were developed for the 1890 census. Punch cards for machine control have been around for much longer, since the Jacquard Loom in 1801. Babbage used them for the program for the Difference/Analytical Engine.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Well, I was pretty sure it would go unnoticed (I did a search on the page first) I do know one piece of software that actually emulates, yes your eyes are not lying, emulates punchcard technology. The company spss (spss.com) uses a software suite originally developed by Quantime (whom they bought as part of their Market Research Division) that uses ansi/c with an abberent twist of their own source plus c-shell scripts (again - your eyes are NOT lying) to emulate punchcard technology. This technology was used for collecting and tabulating survey results.
.....
Suffice to say it is by far the biggest pile of shit I have ever seen. Unprofessional trash that, quite frankly, is embarrassing to punch cards and yes, I have loaded punch card programs, asm, switched in machine and loaded via paper tape.
Big deal.
The fact that these morons were so inept that they kludged a so called software suite based not on obsolete technology but actually obsolete method (there is a difference) is sickening.
Of course they have talked about modernizing with XML.
Yeah, alright.
BTW Im gonna write a modular kernel that won't eat your system for lunch
Here at the U. of Texas the punch cards are relics, but we still use JCL every day. Yes, as someone said, it gives you something to debug once your program is working.
Seriously, we do batch programming here and set up JCL to control batch jobs (with a tool to automate generation, but debugging it is often manual). Also programs on the same mainframe for use via 3270 terminal emulators. Really!
Fortunately we're moving many of the administrative systems to the web now, but even the web scripts still run on the mainframe behind the script. Adabas and Natural.
Java is on the way, but is still about a year off.
Sorry, I can't stop my self :
//go.sysin dd * doo dah doo dah
it's sad, cause I can't write in upper case, since slashcode tells me that I am yelling... well JCL and cobol programmer are so old, that yes, you need to yell !
You should thank your luck! I was told to use ones and zeros, but the one key was broken so I had to use I's!
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
There's a whole system still based around the punch cards. The cards don't exist anymore, but WYLBUR still acts that way. It's viewed as another computer system by the undergrads. I think at one point (92?) they were trying to incorporate email. Just figured I'd throw that in there. As a user, you really wouldn't notice, except that you HAD to obey the 80-character rule. And since they were teaching COBOL and FORTRAN and the like on it, the JCLs all kinda made sense. Hmmm....
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
somewhat offtopic, but the Bruce Sterling/William Gibson collaboration *The Difference Engine* was an interesting alternate history novel, in which a key subplot involved the use of (what were essentially) punchcards.
The idea was that Charles Babbage did construct his Analytical Engine, and from that a steam-driven information age has developed as a result.
Definitely something to check out.
Just keep alive another 20 years. In 2022, whatever you are doing in 2002 will be old-school, back-in-the-day, retro cool: Y2K hype, IPv4, 7-bit ascii, the C programming language.
Anyone remember seeing the numbers tattooed onto arms of victims of Nazi concentration camps in documentaries showing actual WWII film footage?
The films in black and white where a crowd of liberated prisoners stand with their sleeves rolled up, showing their number. Each one of those numbers corresponded with an IBM data punch card.
After the war, hundreds of thousands of these punch cards were discovered in the office buildings of the camps. In particular the Auschwitz camp in Poland, which is now a museum, now has on display these cards of victims who perished there. This comes at around the same time a book is published detailing IBM's role in the Holocaust, "IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation" by Edwin Black.
The Nazis needed to be able to better select, sort, classify and track data on their concentration camp victims. IBM came in with their solution - punch cards were the medium used to store data corresponding with an ID number tattooed onto each victim's forearm. These punch cards were run through a Hollerith tabulator machine.
The Hollerith machine, which was used since the late 19th century to tabulate and alphabetize census data, made rounding up victims, tallying deaths, and overall organizing the war effort extremely efficient. For example, Hole 3 signified homosexual, and Hole 8 designated a Jew. This technology was a precursor, and was a basic building block of IBM personal computers that emerged in the 1980s. Technology that now is used to track, select, classify and sort people today - through the internet?
It makes me wonder why IBM initially didn't want to get into the home computer market and allowed companies like Atari and Commodore to have a crack at ruling the desktop. Atari and then Commodore both tried doing it with computers able to do advanced graphics and sounds. Yet Microsoft ensured the technology of the IBM PC would survive. The technology of the punch card in every user's home. Could it be some sort of conspiracy surviving through the ages?
Part of me does not miss my old military days. However, seeing what exactly a source was in CNN's "sources said..." certainly did make the daily intel briefings interesting.
rodent...
Tactical nuclear weapons are a viable alternative!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Punch cards? It's official - I am an old fart. My first CS courses in college used those things.
The machines used to punch them were nothing I would want to get hit on the head with - cast iron and vacuum tubes.
Imagine a whole room full of those things, everybody punching cards like mad, and somebody DROPS their cards. Oops, there went the whole order of your program.
Here's the total killer - you were allowed 3 runs per 24 hour period. I still flinch when my Delphi app won't compile.
If you got a $100 bill, put your hands up...
Quite impressive.
-Peter
== Just my opinion(s)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Back in the 70s when I was but a small object someone gave me a toy car that read punched cards. Basically you slotted the card in underneath the car, and I suppose it had a lead of in/out switches that got pressed.
Each card would make the car do something; one would make it go in circles forverer, another would make it zoom forward, then do a left turn etc.
The coolest thing, although I was too young to appreciate it at the time (I was about 4), was that they gave you some blank cards and the instructions to "program" the car.
I wish I still had it...
graspee
The problem with being a gunslinger is that there's always somebody that's faster on the draw...
When I was at Boeing in the 90's, they still had many thousands of 80-column punchcards with large square holes in the middle. This spot was filled with a photograph of a line drawing. The card data served to catalog these graphics.
If you post it, they will read.
Well okay it was actually only code from 1991 on 3.5" floppies, but I'm sure, in one of the locked file drawers somewhere there are punch cards. Tons of them. This is probably why I can never find someplace to put my current class materials.
Btw they just stuck a plato terminal up behind glass with bits lieing around in DCL. Quite cool.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
Knocketh not ye olde black art of JCL, equalizer of students and staff.
// language that gave mere mortal freshman power over most profs, should they choose to take the path to mastery of it.
;-)
... at the start of a job got you suspended from the system for a month, because you dared to charge the running of your stupid 370 ASM job to the Academic Computing staff overhead account (who'd'a thought they'd really care about fake money?)
The simple
IEBGENER did copies, ideally of the computer security officer's files, just so you could say you did that. A favorite phrase at the time was, "If I could IEBGENER a car, I would," illustrating the hacker incomprehension that taking a copy of something even if the original was left alone, wasn't very ethical.
IEFBR14 allocated free disk space and left it empty... except for the contents that the previous user of that disk space put there. It was an exploratory activity kind of like surfing the web, a decade before the web, OK?
IEBCOPY copied libraries (kinda like 1-level folders), all the better to grab entire chunks of code written by the security officer at once.
IEHLIST listed the VTOC of the volume. That's like an "ls -alR" for you kiddies. Considering that most student timesharing systems didn't let you see anything outside your home directory, IEHLIST was a great resource for exploring the systems's disks. You never knew where else the security officer's files were, after all.
//AB06HCO JOB (9999,AV99)
I was a young 20-something when I encountered JCL.
I climbed that mountain and went on to systems level assembler, becoming quite proficient at coding 370 ASM and knowing how to chain through 370 OS control blocks to write the mainframe equivalents of fuser, ps, iostat, etc.
To this day, I view it as unfortunate that in interviews I couldn't get anyone to believe that a 24-year-old *GIRL* (yes, woman -- THAT was perhaps the most astonishing thing) had actually attained that degree of mastery of the mainframe. (I had no life at the time....)
I went on to UNIX, and Windows, and except for a brief flirtation with a mainframe project in SAS C, haven't been back. I'll probably never be as good at any system as I was at that mainframe, though.
The 403 and 407 tabulators were basically Very Long Instruction Word machines. Cycles were slow (about one per second), but every register could do an add or subtract on every cycle.
Interesting post. Only one comment:
Yet Microsoft ensured the technology of the IBM PC would survive.
I think it was more the other way around: IBM's PC technology made sure Microsoft survived. There were alternatives to DOS in the old days (CP/M 86, and another one which I can't remember). The fact that IBM's PC-DOS was virtually identical to MS-DOS ( because they bought it from MS, of course) sure helped MS in those days.
MSN 8: Now Microsoft even has bugs in their ad campaigns.
And the size of the hole in a CD is exactly the same as the size of the Dutch 10 cent coin, which has now been replaced by the Euro.
greetings,
Use Adsense for Charity
Its a old Hoover toploader, & it comes with a 2 big square plastic punchcards with notchs on all 4 edges given 8 different cycle settings.
I just use it on the maximum setting, so I haven't pulled the card out & turned it arround in years.
O OOOO O O OO O OO O OO OOO OO
OO OO OOO O OOOO OOOOO O OO O OOO
OO OO O O OOO OOO OO O OOO O O
O0O000O00O0 O O O OOOOO O O OOOOO
OOO O OO OOO OOOO OO OO O OO OOO
OO O OO O OOO OOO O O OOOOO O OO
O O OOOOOO O O OO0O000 O O OOO OO
I've always loved that joke....
In 1984, I went to cleveland state university. My first cis class was fortran. They handed me stack of cards and a simple program to write.
I punched out the program on a puncher that made barely deciphrable marks above the punches (so you could read your code.)
Handed the cards off to be processed. 24 hours later I was told there was an error. I couldn't read one of the 24 cards. As I was trying to figure it out, and walking back to class, I was bumped and dropped the cards in a mess.
I dropped the class. Left CSU. Never took another computer science class in my life.
I was going to say I should curse punchcards, but in the long run, I guess I should thank them.
Chet
Russian Air Force Chief Says
Official 9-11 Story Impossible
[Posted 13 September 2001]
As one considers the terrible events of Sept. 11 and observes U.S. media reaction, so pervasive and consistently military that it appears choreographed, doubts increase. The following is from pravda.ru, a Russian language Website (politically centrist, nationalist). In some places the English translation is confusing, so we added alternate phrasing in brackets.
- Jared Israel
[Start report from Russia] "Generally it is impossible to carry out an act of terror on the scenario which was used in the USA yesterday." This was said by the commander-in-chief of the Russian Air Force, Anatoli Kornukov. "We had such facts [i.e., events or incidents] too", - said the general straightforwardly. Kornukov did not specify what happened in Russia and when and to what extent it resembled the events in the US. He did not advise what was the end of air terrorists' attempts either.
But the fact the general said that means a lot. As it turns out the way the terrorists acted in America is not unique. The notification and control system for the air transport in Russia does not allow uncontrolled flights and leads to immediate reaction of the anti-missile defense, Kornukov said. "As soon as something like that happens here, I am reported about that right away and in a minute we are all up," - said the general. [End report from Russia.]
Pasted from: The Emperor's New Clothes
I am into the copy and paste.
is still in use all over the landscape. Its input layout (5 columns for line number, 1 column for continuation, ignore everything after column 72 so that we may punch in serial numbers making it possible to sort the cards in case they have fallen down) is punch card related.
80 columns for terminals is rather standard. Punch card size.
I don't much like JCL, but I have to say something, having had to deal with it's successors, the myriad of different and badly documented Unix text files and the Windows registry - it's consistent and well-documented and when it fails you get an error message that always enables you to solve the problem.
yes that brings back the memories. But I wonder why all those people tell the tale of dropped cards messing up your program? Forgot the 6 digit line numbers that usually were placed in column 73 to 80? Just put the pile into mechanical sorter and after some rattling you have your program. The nice thing is that many online editors later still had the feature of "automatic line numbering", automatically putting line numbers in columns 73 to 80. BTW can emacs do this? :)
well as far as i rember it was a 6 digit number, but columns 73 to 80 where reserved and unused by the compiler. Maybe two of these columns were reserved for future use or something. Or maybe it was an 8 digit number :)
You had CARDS? Lucky.
In my day, we didn't even have DATA! Our "computer" was a giant obsidian obelisk, and we "executed instructions" by applying our "input" via bone hammers to the heads of our fellow monkeys.
Proper "program execution" meant food for a week!
--- php: perl hates people
Some of us write code at a beach with out computers :-)
In my high school fortran class you got once chance a day to run code and it had to work in a week. There was no room for mistakes since you had 5 compiles to get it right. It was a very worthwile system since it taught me how to the first time around. I've noticed that coders that learned to code in a nice clean baby sitting enviorment don't code as well as they think they can and when you throw real world embedded systems at them, they can't cope. If you can't get anything bigger than hello world to compile, you should work on foccusing on the problem at hand.
Whilst rooting about in some books a while back I came across an old, lone, pink punchcard being used as a bookmark. To put things into perspective for my colleague I simply wrote on this card "Count your blessings" and placed it next to his keyboard.
It was quickly taped to his monitor (after I explained what it was) and there it remains to this day.
"Don't get mad, get a monkey!"
perdida is very well known girl troll.
Not this again.
I don't normally go around flaming people for the stuff they post, but this is ridiculous. I hope it's a troll, in which case I'll gladly admit to having been had, but just in case it isn't (after all, someone did in all seriousness write that ridiculous book you're referring to) allow me to set you straight.
The German subsidiary of IBM sold data processing technology to the nazis. True. It was tried and tested technology, they didn't actively work with the nazis to further refine it, it was already there. It just so happened that the nazis had an extremely effective administration already in place, so the IBM machines could be used as efficiently as possible. Furthermore, when the nazis created new sets of administrative data (pertaining, for instance, to the Final Solution) they were smart enough to set it up in such a way as to be able to feed it more easily to the nice and shiny Holleriths they had. Makes sense, no?
From this does not follow that "IBM was responsible for the holocaust" and you're way out of line if you're suggesting that the PC and Internet we use today wouldn't have existed if it weren't for the nazis looking for an efficient system to structure the murder of six million Jews
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
The Jacquard and Babbage cards were quite a lot different from the Hollerith version. Jacquard cards were _huge and were stitched together along the sides to form an endless loop; each hole controlled the lifter for one warp thread, and the loop gave the loom a repeating pattern. I haven't seen pictures of the Babbage cards.
And I think it was the 1880 census.
Wow, you must have had some crazy parties in college if your talking aboutIEBGENER'ing a car! It's interesting that you put so much effort into learning and mastering mainframe but look back on it as if you'll never do it again.
rejected (19) accepted (0)
Is there a psychological term related to getting your stories rejected on slashdot?
It was the 1890 census. And standard VGA text is 80 columns today in large part because of the ~1930 upgrade of Hollerith's cards to 80 columns, and hasn't changed in any meaningful way since the 1950s.
BTW, for those who don't know, the company Hollerith formed to service the 1890 census changed it's name in 1924 to IBM.
Oh, yeah, one more thing:
:-)
A lot of people think EBCDIC is one of those "IBM tries to adopt something incompatible to lock people in" moves. The 1890 cards were encoded essentially in EBCDIC, it predates ASCII by a long damn time.
Which doesn't mean it doesn't suck.
You'd (pardon the pun) think that when a system is into genocide the last thing they'd bother about is actually keeping records about the whole thing. Or did they love genocide that much that they got a kick out of actually measuring their success ?
To think I actually had moral qualms when I was writing a piece of code for a HR mgmt application. It was roughly a way of finding out if a company was over or under staffed, which meant that eventually they'd be sacking people on the evidence of the numbers produced by my s/w.
The dudes who wrote the code for the death camp HR system had to be some bad s.o.b.s
Yeah, that's hardcore, alright.
;)
But some foreign dependancies of Hollerith/IBM still kept the name Hollerith until, hummm, a different kind of census, some 15 years later... But this didn't really happen. Shshsht, nothing to see, move along.
no text
Quite impressive.
Yes, very.
More exactly -- Hollerith's company merged with other companies to form IBM, directed by Watson, Sr.. Their biggest product was employee time clocks for quite a while.
"All this equipment that's out there has to use something that's the same size as the original punch cards," said Mr. Oliver...
Trivia: "Hollerith" cards were the same size as U.S. Confederate Bills, the currency that pre-dates the current U.S. Treasury Notes.
Question: where the hell did 8-1/2 x 11 inch letterhead come from?
...even though the article didn't, it's worth noting that most of the code in existence today is COBOL, and legacy COBOL code is, as far as I know, always driven by JCL, the Original Script Language From Heck.
Having had to document JCL standards at two customer sites, I learned to feel sorry for the programmers. Both COBOL and JCL have formatting and syntax rules that are based on the usage of these 80-column cards, and heaven help you if you put in an extra space where the JCL interpreter wasn't expecting one; you'll be tearing your hair out figuring out what went wrong with an otherwise perfectly valid JCL expression. Rotsa ruck, buddy.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
The statement "did not actively work with the Nazi's" is inaccurate. Punch card systems design inherently required hands-on involvement from IBM, or a subsidiary shell company that elaborate mechanics were deployed to keep a river of profits flowing to IBM headquarters. In a time (the 1930's) when most businesses were struggling to stay afloat, IBM was expanding at an exponential rate, thanks in large part to Hitler Germany's rabid adoption of Hollerith technology. Each "application" had to be uniquely designed - and involved heavy participation by an IBM analyst to design the precise card question and response holes, and each set of machines needed calibrated. Also, IBM controlled the paper stock supply and the raw card inventory could only be obtained from IBM.
Thomas Watson received the highest Nazi award bestown to any non-German. While he returned it later, there is a mountain of evidence that points to his all consuming machinations to ensure the steady flow of profit from a newly, developing "unified Europe". And though you are correct in that it does not follow that "IBM was responsible for the holocaust", IBM directly aided and abetted the processing of identifying, rounding up of, stripping property, and shipping off to hellholes those of Jewish descent. It expedited and mobilized the entire process - and it certainly wasn't a case of the Nazi's buying the machines and cards and plugging them together themselves. It was entirely different deal than say a rogue government today that purchased equipment and software (which would be illegal in many cases, at least according to statutes) and then the subsequent operation of said machines and software was totally autonomous from the manufacturing process. But that wasn't the case with IBM and Nazi Germany.
There's probaly already a link here somewhere to it but here it is again - IBM and the Holocaust - I'm about 75% through the book and actually thought like you did before reading it. But the author, Edwin Black, although heavily tainted by the atrocities committed (and what person really can be not affected by the true evil that was done? ...), has compiled an extensive record of the collaboration between IBM and Hitler's minions.
AZspot
I'm a little late in seeing this post, but I just have to sound off. I actually have to learn JCL (already took a class on the basics) for my job. We're going to use it to submit jobs to a mainframe at JSC for testing shuttle avionics software.
:p
The good thing is that we don't have to use physical punch cards anymore. The bad news is that we still have to use JCL
That's Mr. Eradicator to you.
trance-port
may father is a machanical Enginier. i remeber him telling me that you want to put a diagonal line acros the top of your punch cards so you know that they'er in order. Now major corporations use smartcards to "keep the company safe" but they dont have a way to know it every card is acounted for. a diagonal line may not be much but its more then what larger Corporations due. if the airlines still use what ain't broke, GOOD FOR THEM!!! O_O why does it take me to point out that if your using a 486 for something and in ten years its still doing a good job, YOU DONT HAVE TO CHANGE IT!?
Careful what you say around me.. I will assume you mean it.
That DEC in the dark is nice. Reminds me of Christmas, oddly.
The Jacquard and Babbage cards were quite a lot different from the Hollerith version
Quite right. But the OP said that punch cards were developed/invented for the 1890 census. I merely commented that *Hollerith* cards were invented for that census, and pointed to prior art.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
The statement "did not actively work with the Nazi's" is inaccurate. Punch card systems design inherently required hands-on involvement from IBM, or a subsidiary shell company that elaborate mechanics were deployed to keep a river of profits flowing to IBM headquarters. In a time (the 1930's) when most businesses were struggling to stay afloat, IBM was expanding at an exponential rate, thanks in large part to Hitler Germany's rabid adoption of Hollerith technology. Each "application" had to be uniquely designed - and involved heavy participation by an IBM analyst to design the precise card question and response holes, and each set of machines needed calibrated. Also, IBM controlled the paper stock supply and the raw card inventory could only be obtained from IBM.
That's right, they sold a product, namely "efficient data storage, retrieval and manipulation". Just like IBM does today. If it had happened sixty years later, the nazis would've bought a relational database plus support, from IBM, say, or from Oracle. The machines and services IBM sold were used for a wide variety of purposes. Tax records, population data, accounting, basically every task the government performed. Yes, the quaint little extras of nazi-style government as well, but in principle it was nothing more than an early and succesful attempt to automate government.
As for the book, I'd be really careful about taking what it says at face value. "IBM and the Holocaust", unlike "Hitler's Willing Executioners" (a good, if frightening read) is not the sturdy historical treatise you seem to think it is (hence my "not this again" comment in my earlier post). Most historians feel the "facts" presented in the book are conjecture at best, served up in a sensationalist fashion to arouse interest in the book.
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
I graduated from Clemson U in EE in 1996. Every freshman engineer had a few weeks of JCL torture in ENGR 180.
//sysabend dd sysout=slashdot
Yep, old words are pressed into new uses all the time. Just like your "dial" example:
Computer -- An occupation (like banker). One who performs calculations for a living.
Dashboard -- The curved piece of wood in front of a buggy that keeps the horse from "dashing" mud up onto you.
The lawyers who were sueing IBM in a class action over this have more documents, but they dropped the lawsuit last year.
The best ones are the paper sheets with a pen ( not pencle obviously, because it could be changed post-facto) And you don't have all the retarded issues you did with the florida stuff
A voting system where five percent of the balots fuck up is not a good one. You'd get better accuracy with a damn telephone poll
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
unpunching a hole dosn't really sound so difficult...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
A resource for punched card information:
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/cards/index.html
Like others have posted here, I've always wanted to try my hand at punched card programming. Normal people (non geeks) look at me funny when we talk about it.
:)
Has anyone found software that allows you to virtually punch cards and run them through a virtual reader?
I'd love to try to create something comparable to a "Hello World!" program
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
I though punched cards were invented in France as a means of controlling looms. (What's with the use of the word "digital" in the story? Punched cards are digital storage devices, too.)
To quote:
>Most people, there and here, see technology
>as a necessary evil, not a blessing
If that were true then we wouldn't have any technology beyond an animal hide code, fire and sharp flint.
As rule, people like technology. That's why it dominates our world economy, that's why your life and mine is full of it
Our brains and our ability to use them to create technology (from fashioning simple tool's to building space stations) make us distinct from other species. We *love* technology. Axes, clothing, wheel's, mills, metal armour, weapons, trains, cars, calculators, digital watches, Space Shuttles, TV's, CD's, DVD's...
Are all the above a "necessary evil"? No.
We built them because we wanted to. For example, we can get along WITHOUT digital watches, but they are easier to read than analog watches, so we have them. They are not *necessary* nor are they *evil*.
New technology is built for a reason, usually because the existing technology was lacking in some way.
Don't be so arrogant as to suggest that people in Africa don't want new technology. They do. They WANT medical care they WANT better transport they WANT wells with clean water they WANT to grow crops.
They ALL require technology. I am FUCKED OFF with reading bullshit about *how EVIL* technology is. It's not that we are FORCED to use NEW TECHNOLOGY, we WANT TO. We *GRAVITATE TOWARDS IT*. The last 10,000 years has shown us that clearly, why do you have such a problem seeing that?
Technology is good and if you cant' see what makes punch cards a limited and retarded system to impliment then you should not be advocating policy. Take for example:
A horse and cart is better than walking.
Cars are better than a horse and cart.
I'm sure some people in parts of the world don't think there is anything wrong with a horse and cart. Primarily because they've not seen what a Car can do for them and their society. We have, THAT's why we drive cars.
By the same token, any system which uses punch cards (for anything other than storing 'tokens', as with a cookie) is linear and very limited in what it can do, it's not fully programmable and not flexible, that means it can't be modified to be more useful.
Newer usually IS better. If you can't see that, I suggest you try living with out some new technology (hey, you do NOT *need* that computer, you just want it, so don't make excuses). If technology is so bad, why arn't you amish?
virtual punch cards (not real ones) are acutlly in use on some old mainframes. You copy those card jobs to tapes and read from a more stable media. But still it is 80col card jobs. JCL or some other stuff.
Used to work with Siemens BS1000 Systems that way, 10 years back in time.
On my web site, I have a picture of one of my punchards (you can also see where the holes are):
http://iamsam.com/images/pnchcard.jpg
I scanned this card in. This card was placed before a program so that when the card reader scanned in several jobs, it would know to whom the job was connected, and what language to use.
This punchcard (80 columns) has my account number for the system that it was used on (N0000), my name, NITZBERG, and the language WATFIV (a dialect of Fortran).
Enjoy...
Sam Nitzberg
http://www.iamsam.com
sam@iamsam.com
- More than fifty different blinking lights that indicated more than simple traffic
- Bunches of rotary dials of the sort that used to be on televisions that most Slashdotters are probably too young to remember, either
- Secret panels containing toggle switches to manipulate the inner workings of the machine
Sure, there are cheap handheld devices today that can outmuscle an IBM System/3, but they are all about as exciting as toasters by comparison. Old iron was just plain cool.Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Just take my point of view as worth the same as yours.
I would like to enjoy living with the natural world around me, and to do so with the minimum amount of unpleasant work and spoiling of the environment.
So my guideline for using technology is to count the cost of it, as well as the benefits. Shelter, clothes, warmth, a peaceful environment and opportunities for people to engage in rewarding activities that don't involve harming others - that's the goal.
Please don't let your liking for 'technology' create a world where there have to be polluting industries and oppressed work forces.
Punch cards are a hell of a lot older than Hollerith. They were invented near the start of the Industrial Revolution by a Frenchman named Jacquard (sp?) who used them to store patterns for an automatic loom.
(Side note: The Analytical Engine - Charles Babbage's never-built successor to the Difference Engine - was also going to use punched cards).
Harry
my workprints from DuArt labs still come back with blue paper tape with color timing info. apparently an industry standard.
....
i still have a stacks of those hollerith cards from the days at city college. i don't miss them at all but i love to use them as bookmarks. well, i'm dating myself
Hmm - let's say you did accidentally drop that card deck on the floor or fumbled it while loading the stacks of card into the card reader (only so many cards could fit in the reader at one load - if you had boxes of cards you had to continually feed them in ...)? Well, columns 73-80 were reserved for numbering each card - you thus had a fighting chance of getting the cards back in order :-) Just collect them off of the floor, run them through a sorter, and then manually check that you aren't missing any cards. Of course, you did number the cards didn't you :-) The use of a formatted drum card (which appeared on later punch card machines) did make this task a bit easier. In effect, drum cards (made from a regular punch card and wrapped around a drum on the punch card machine) defined pre-formatted layouts for a card so you could do things such as tab ahead to the desired column, automatically insert fixed text, repeat punching the same card, etc. You could also have your cards numbered by running them again through another machine (which could also make a "back-up" deck of cards for you). And remember to initially number them by increments of 10, for example, to permit adding new cards to the deck later (e.g. new progamming code).
Standard IBM keypunches (during most of the 1960's with many still in use in the 1970s') did not type the letters on the cards when you punched the holes.
You could also turn off printing on latter punch card machines - saved ink :-) - but also enabled a degree of security for your code and data as it was a lot harder and more time-consuming trying to determine the character typed from the hole punches!
I have wondered this before (too lazy to develop), but...
If someone took a sample of the sound you get when you press a key on an IBM keypunch, relatively simple driver software would allow you to hear that sound every time you press a key on your PC. I think that I would enjoy that very much, especially when working on my notebook in a "modern" computing lab.
Has anyone seen anything like this ? (klunk-klunk-klunk)...
Thanks..
Sam Nitzberg
sam@iamsam.com
http://www.iamsam.com
That was my first computer also. Ahh the memories, Car Wars, Apliner, Parsac, Hunt the Wumpus, and of course my favorite, Tunnels of Doom. That game simply rocked. I think I've spend the last 17 years or so trying to find a game that I enjoy as much as I used to enjoy that one :).
Finkployd
So...farming a few acres for food, a garden for opium and marijuana, perhaps a vineyard for wine.
Someone to talk to, someone to hold at night.
Hippie bullshit?
Writers imply. Readers infer.
I absolutely can't agree.
To have confidence in the scanner system, all of the software involved would have to be Open Source and there would have to be a good configuration control procedure to insure that the published source is actually used during the election.
If the counting programs are closed source, you have no idea at all how or if your vote is counted.
And since everywhere those scanners are used the counting program is provided by the same company who treats the program as a trade secret, you don't know if that company has decided the outcome of the election and programmed the computers accordingly.
The best election system is one where you mark your selections on paper and they are counted at the polling place with anyone allowed to watch the counting.
++PLS
It's accurate to say that I like new technology more than most people, because it's an important, and at the present time - a defining - part of our social development, gobally. I think that this will be the case for at very least the next 100 years, and think that this will possibly only change when other goals, such as global stability and prosperity are assured, which will certainly take a lot longer than 100 years.
It's also accurate to say I don't want to stand in the way of anyone who only want's to use technolgy for simple benifts, not gratuatously.
Additionaly, I too do not want to pollute the environment, but there are better ways to avoid that than by avoiding technology, such as by using public transport rather than cars and by trying to using less gas and electricity, all of which I do. I remain, however, the very definition of the Sceptical Enviromentalist.
However, it's also fair to say that most people appreciate and desire technology for *more* than just basic nessities. Your stated goal is NOT everybodys goal, and I don't think it's even most people goal, it is at best a short term goal for the poorest of countries.
Technology is not just about giving us tools to do basic things better. It's also drives our economy. It makes things possible that we hadn't dreamed of before. Very little of todays technology is directly related to making us warmer, or giving us shelter or food.
-We already make enough food for the entire planet.
-We can already cloathe the entire planet.
-We can already build houses for the entire planet.
Technically, we can - or could - do all these things, within in the year. The problem is political and economic, not technological.
So technology will continue to advance. New things will become possible, once expensive technology will became cheap, commonplace and ultimately fit in your wristwatch. Technology keeps making our lives better and keeps driving business, creating new oppertunaties, even new problems, and so driving the economy.
Technology does not create oppressed work forces, and neither does my liking it. That is childish hocum.
Infact, technology ensures the current level of stability in our society, primarily though arms. Because we (modern, stable, societies) have better technology we can ensure our survival.
- UN, NATO and the US use superior technology to dominate the globe, defend their interests and ensure stability gobally.
- Japan and Asia use superiour technology to dominate ecnomically.
Technology is not evil and neither is science. They are both more often used to good ends. Until we invent killer robots who inslave man kind, *technology* or anyone liking it does NOT oppress people or cause irreprable harm to the planet.
As a final note, just to reiterate my point, technology is way -way- beyond clothing, food and basic survival.
The Amish use only basic survival technology. Even the Amish should apperciate that there very existance and continued unitterupted lifestyle is due *only* to technology way in advance of that they they use, as it is such levels of distain for technology are often from arrogance or utter incomprehension of technology, economics, politics or history. America is particualy bad at teaching these things to it's children, at least on a global scale.
The *Roman's* had a more advanced level of technology than the Amish, as any one who studied classics, ancient history or latin will be able to tell you. Even in pre-christianty, and that's very important.
Yet I doubt, given the standard of American education or the Amish desire to shun technology that anyone Amish would be able to what level of technology they had or WHY it was imporant.
This is not to pick on the Amish, as many Americans would also have difficulty, but I doubt anyone Amish could even touch on this, so I will provide an answer:
It's the reason why we and they speak the English language. It's the reason why they use a *roman alphabet* to write. Without the Romans (and the Greeks) we'd never had heard of the concept of a democracy. In all likely hood they'd all still be in Europe and we'd all still be living in stone hut's and be covered in mut, because no one would have shown us to make concreate buildings and we'd never have thought of having water in pipes (let alone *hot* running water, underfloor heating, mordern farming, state education, legal justice, that sort of thing)
If technology was as childishly simple as providing a place to live, clothing and food to eat we would have stopped developing it over 2000 years ago.
BIZARRE?? BIZARRE???
I write JCL every day! Mainframes are still around, and so are batch jobs!
Punchcards are long gone though. The JCL is on disk now. But as much as I hated it when I started doing this, it served (and still serves) a purpose in the mainframe environment.
When I first started doing mainframe stuff about 20 years ago, punchcards were still around, but were on their way out. The company I was working for was putting in a new datacenter, and of course they got a card reader/punch. Why? Because we had batch streams that punched cards from one job to be read into the next, and then thrown away! Why did we do that? Because the service bureau we used before we got our own datacenter charged for disk and tape space, but the cards were our own, and therefore free. When we suggested changing to disk or tape for the staging files, management fought us! The PHB's, ex-techs all, LOVED those punchcards!
We got rid of them anyway and the card reader collected dust for a couple of years till we dumped it.
When I was in the air force, we were phasing out punch cards (this was in late 80's). However most of the programs still had punch card code in them. So what was done was interface programs were made. Instead of actually punching cards, then reading them in later, they were save in this program called "pseudo" (for false punch cards), in "buckets" for each program. This pseudo program simulated reading in punch cards to another program. Instead of just rewriting the programs so no "punch card" interfaces were used at all, they just simulated it.
Kind of funny...
Actually punch cards predate computers by a wide margin; punch card weaving machines were in the forefront of the industrial revolution. And my grandmother used Hollerith cards (with steel pins to align the data fields) in an early 20th century census.
My first horror was 'mark sense' cards for us lower-than-low students. Instead of punching the card, we had to mark it with a soft pencil. The cards were then read by a photo-electric cell. After a few hours use, the machine would clog with pencil graphite and we'd have to wait for the white coat man to reluctantly clean it - again. With a queue of students, all with assignments due today, it was a bad scene.
Later I graduated to punch cards. My second horror. I couldn't type for nuts - still can't I guess. Eighty columns to be filled; one wrong keypress and the card ruined. By the time I got to seventy odd columns things would getting pretty stressed.
Then you had to give your precious card deck to the men in white coats (again), and wait... Sometimes half an hour; until they finally brought back your printout. And yes, 'Syntax error in line 2: Operator entered DS'.
Keep punch cards where they belong; an interesting relic of history.
Where did 8-1/2 x 11 inch letterhead come from?
right here