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?
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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!
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.
-=Maggie Leber=-
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
The statement maps the symbolic file reference SYSIN as it is known in the program(s) to be run by the job step to a file '*'.. It's been years that I had to fsck around with JCL but '*' might mean input from the reader or maybe a terminal device.
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
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.
My father used to bring home stacks of those orange cards with the numbers on them when I was little.
:).
.but in a much different manner. . .you're all decribing my childhood toys! :).
.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. . .
.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. . .
:).
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. .
Man, I used to remeber going into work with him sometimnes when he was 'on call' during the week-ends. .
He disliked it very much when I used to play "hide and seek" under the raised floor. .
Man I only wish that I could have so much fun with such simple things today!
Then I wonder why I am a geek
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.
I mean, anyone who relates to this story is probably in bed asleep already. ;)
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"
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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....