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)."
When submiting a job with JCL the are different control parmaters that can be set. One is your SYSIN which depending on the type of job you are running could be anything from input dataset name to where your ouput of the system dump if you program blows.
--- Errr......No I don't need more oral sex thank you, Windows goes down on me all the time.
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.
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
Ever wonder why hex FF never gets a printable character?
Hex 7F (all holes punched in a 7 bit system) doesn't get a printable character, at least not in ASCII. But FF is a printable character in a lot of character sets - Latin 1 has ÿ in that spot.