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?
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?
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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)
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!
--
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.
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.
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".
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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!
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 :)
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...
Hmmmm.. I meant to say, I had just read Tau Zero, a GREAT sci-fi novel...
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"
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.
I remember writing scripts for SAS, the stat package. To get your data read in you wrote "cards;"
The circuit simulator SPICE shares this legacy.
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!
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
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.
This thread also reminds me of an old fortune(1) output: "How was Thomas Watson buried? 9 edge down." --- totally cryptic unless you'd ever seen a punch card, and knew that Watson was the founder of IBM.
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
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"?
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
Right.... but I'm mainly talking about punch cards. I program 8-bit microcontrollers already, not much new there.
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
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.
$JOB KP=26
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
You do a 'delete' on a single char on either the KP26 or KP29 (I forget which). Essentially it punched all 12 holes. But it caused the IBM card reader to ignore that position.
Of course, if you did that on all 80 positions, you got a lace card...
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
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
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?
Are you sure there wasn't a midget in there?
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
The problem with being a gunslinger is that there's always somebody that's faster on the draw...
I have wondered for over 20 years where the form factor of the Hollerith card came from. Thanks!!
Hollerith cards are also where 80 column displays and printers derive from
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.
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....
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.
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
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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.
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.
Yeah, that's hardcore, alright.
;)
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
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/
viruses, trojans, hackers, crackers
Well maybe not viruses and trojans, but hackers and crackers are still very much possible. A disgruntled employee knows the password to admin so he logs in and types 'pend' for the hell of it.
EULAs Uhhhh well IBM still has a pretty fascist LA with whatever company is running the mainframe... this is proprietary in the true sense of the word, not what the /. ameteurs think the words means, the OS is tied to IBM and is leased and is subscribed to.
Microsoft /. if you didn't slam MS in some way. I can't tell you how many times I wish I had access to a modern system that used heirarchical file systems instead of cryptic and badly written JCL and JECL statements.
Ah, yes, this wouldn't be
BSOD
Our mainframe was poorly administered so occasionally it would not returned from answered partitions... meaning it had to be rebooted basically and the disk would have to perform a disk check like any other OS.
It means users using the computer to get the job done, not web surfing, playing minesweeper or struggling with the latest Outlook disaster.
Well whatever... it also means struggling to use a cryptic and antiquated system while real work could be accomplished on a mini or a pc.
It means hardware, operating systems, compilers and utilities debugged over nearly 40 years that work 7/24 without a hiccup.
Granted IBM hardware is rock solid... although our in house utilities sucked @ss, still a Sun SPARC will work running Solaris works just as well as the IBM mainframe we used. I'm not anti-mainframe I'm just staunchly anti-JCL, I'd rather flip burger than work with it again.
Sorry you lost your job :)
Don't be, I'm not.
Columns 73 to 80 were expected to be used for some combination of deck-id and sequence. To get the deck id just run the deck through a duplicating keypunch with the right program card and the deck id in columns 73 thru whatever.
unpunching a hole dosn't really sound so difficult...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I can. I've seen them. I've worked in them.
Keypunches, sorting machines, tabulating equipment like IBM 604's. The cluster almost made what would today be a poor old computer.
While I agree with you "Hitler's Willing Executioners" had its flaws, as does any historical treatise, it lacked the sensationalism and outright conjecture of "IBM and the holocaust". Goldhagen was one-sided, the IBM guy made things up.
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
- 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.
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
Of course, if you did that on all 80 positions, you got a lace card...
... lace cards ... slip one into someone ELSE's deck ... hehehe
mmmmmmmm
utter rubbish