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

oh yeah...

[doooras]

after enough holes get punched in your card you get a free sandwich, right?

I see

[felipeal]

...that there are stll many applications that use punchcards.

Like the state-of-art US ellection system...

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

[gnetwerker]

I don't mean to be an old fart of the "I walked ten miles to school uphill in the snow" variety, but it might benefit /.ers to remember that they didn't invent computers, software, or much of the technology they gleefully use and (?) misuse.

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

Airman Initiation...

[phraktyl]

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.

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.

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.