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)."

Comments

Non-Volatile Memory

[Aging_Newbie]

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.

Re:Use JCL to stop junk mail (postal)?

[MaggieL]

Not so much someone named //SYSIN DD * (which a stream starting with //SYSIN DD DATA could cope with, but rather somone named simply /* would be good. In any case, a well-coded "DLM=" parm would be a help.

Every once in a while someting stirs these old memories and it makes my brain hurt. I once had an ISPF display in a window on the same desktop with some Java source code in another window and my ears started to bleed.

Old Timer Story

[dhovis]

When I was in high school (10 years ago or so). I went with my father (a CS prof) to some seminars. There we met and talked with some old timers who'd been working with computers since the 50s. They told us about "code libraries" starting back in the days of punch cards. The story went something like this:

Bob: Hey Joe, didn't you write an I/O routine last week.

Joe: Yeah. [Joe pulls a stack of punch cards down off a shelf with a rubber band around them, and hands them to Bob.]

Bob: Thanks. [Bob removes the rubber band and inserts the stack of punch cards into the program he is writing.]

Re:What's so different about this and...

[CaptainCarrot]

Not so different if you're only thinking about applications like using them as timecards. My own company, a major Santa Clara Valey defense contractor, only gave them up a little over a year ago, replacing them with an electronic system that looks as if it were designed for Windows 3.1. They waited so long for much the same reason as many of the organizations mentioned in the article did: it was old, but it worked and it's therefore difficult to justify the cost of replacing the entire system.

The cards were prepunched with our employee ID numbers, the building and organization numbers, and a week code. Hours were recorded on the face of the card by handwriting, and were manually keyed in later by payroll staff. (It became very much an art to legibly write your charge numbers and hours around the holes.) Ultimately, I think it was the cost of maintaining a trained group of keypunch operators that only had real work one or two days a week that instigated the changeover.

Of course, it would be hideously impractical to use a punchcard as an ID card. They're just not durable enough to carry around in your walled and still last any length of time. But you're right: conceptually, for that particular application, there's very little difference.

The difference comes in some of the other applications mentioned. Your ID card isn't really a data storage format -- nobody ever considered storing mass amounts of data on stacks of ID cards -- but cards punched with Hollerith codes are both a medium and a format. They can store data, as the article mentioned with the old nuclear test data that's only recently been converted, or they can store code -- Fortran, for example, was designed to be used with punch cards and this is why Fortran IV was so rigid about line lengths, what information goes in what columns, and so forth.

Re:Seen them!? I punched 'em - still have a box ..

[puetzc]

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.

Re:When I was kid.

[cgleba]

My father used to bring home stacks of those orange cards with the numbers on them when I was little.

They used to be a blast! Man, the card houses I used to make with those! Nasty paper airplanes, too :).

Apparently they became obsolete when his company upgraded to "round tape". A few years later he brought me these round plastic discs about 9" in diameter and hollow in the middle. Who needs frisbees when you have these! (appartently they had upgraded to "square tape").

Ironically all this talk is making me nostalic also. . .but in a much different manner. . .you're all decribing my childhood toys! :).

Man, I used to remeber going into work with him sometimnes when he was 'on call' during the week-ends. . .used to play with miles of scrap tractor-feed cut-offs as he bitched about a wierd thing called 'JCL'. It was better then plastic ball cages at McDonalds! I used to spend hours staring at the tractor-trailer sized laser printer that ran through a box of tractor feed in about a half hour. . .

He disliked it very much when I used to play "hide and seek" under the raised floor. . .even much more so then when I did the same with my mother in the round clothes racks :). . . later on he made good use of this habit by handing me a cable to snake while I was under there. . .

Man I only wish that I could have so much fun with such simple things today!

Then I wonder why I am a geek :).

Here's Some More Arcana:

[Anonymous Coward]

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. There was a separate machine called an interpreter to do that. Take the punched cards and run them through the interpreter to see if you punched the right data. But -- the cards had 80 columns of holes, but the font from the interpreter was a little bigger, and only 62 columns of interpretation showed on the card! The only way to check if your cards were right was to keypunch them again in another machine called a verifier that would signal tilt if you tried to punch a hole where there wasn't already a hole.

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.

IBM, Punchcards, and the Holocaust

[omega9]

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.