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The Last of the Punch Card Programmers
Peter Cus writes "Cluny Lace, an English lacemaking manufacturer, has reverted to 19th-Century Leavers machines in order to stay competitive. These 19th-Century machines use Jacquard punch cards. Ian Elm, thought to be the last of the card punchers, says young people don't want factory work: 'Younger people coming into a trade want a guarantee of a career out of it, and this is so uncertain.'"
I well remember punching decks of cards for my Computer Science classes, then "submitting" them to the guy behind the bank-teller window in the Mainframe Suite and waiting for my job to finish so another guy could hand me a thick stack of folded paper from the LinePrinter so I could see if my program had worked. I always got a laugh out of waiting an hour or more for my printout, which proclaimed on the second page that I had consumed .00058 seconds of CPU time -- talk about a responsive user interface!