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.'"

Comments

Hard to believe

[mangu]

There's something more that the article did not mention. It's not as if 19th century technology has been forgotten already.

If there is a market for it, you can be sure someone will build a modern machine to do it better, faster, and cheaper than those old machines do.

Re:Hard to believe

[Colin Smith]

If there is a market for it.

Well, that's the key isn't it. You have to have a market which understands and cares about quality. So far, there isn't really any evidence for that. The evidence is generally for faster/cheaper.

What market exists for quality is only sufficient to sustain some old 19th century technologies.
 

Re:Hard to believe

[vlm]

ASIC vs generic CPU analogy FTW!

More like discrete logic chips vs FPGA

Re:Hard to believe

[hey!]

This reminds me of the most fascinating lecture by a bad speaker I've ever heard. It was a by a cognitive therapist on the topic of "Willpower". He had what I thought was an interesting point: there are other ways to conceptualize self-discipline than in terms of willpower. He argued that it is more useful to look at what we call willpower as a matter of scope: the universe of outcomes we consider when we make a decision. There is the dimension of time: if I buy the cheap alternative now, in the short term I have the widget I need and more money in my pocket. In the long term I may have to keep buying that widget over and over again. There is a social dimension. If I make a selfish decision, I undermine people around me upon whom I depend. I think one aspect of contemporary culture is a pressure to narrow the scope of our decisions. We are trained by big box stores to go to the store with the lowest advertised entry price and walk out on our first visit having made a purchase. If that purchase is cheesy enough, we'll be back again soon for a replacement. Our attention is saturated with distractions and exhortations to act now because the clock is ticking on a low price for a purchase we probably shouldn't make in the first place.

We've been trained, I think, not to buy quality for *pragmatic* reasons. Instead, quality is a *fashion statement*. People will will drop several thousand dollars on a Rolex watch that doesn't keep any better time than a $30 watch with a Japanese quartz movement, because of the vast amount of labor and craftsmanship lavished on the inferior technology to bring it up to scratch. As it happens, I don't condemn the quality as fashion statement phenomenon. Arguably it is entirely rational to make top quality lace using 19th century tech. What better place to make a fashion statement than in fashion? There is a certain charm to displaying an elaborate textile created on a authentic period technology. Likewise there's a charm to having a watch (which is after all jewelry) with an exhibition back that lets you show off the complex automatic movement. I do worry about the lack of pragmatic concern for quality.

As an environmentalist I believe one of the best ways to reduce human impact on the Earth while improving human lives is to focus on pragmatic quality. Buying quality is even better than recycling. It's actually better for the planet to drop a couple thousand dollars on an office chair that will look like new in twenty years, than to buy five or six cheap chairs over the years that fall apart. That's true even if you recycle the junk chairs. In the meantime you're a lot more comfortable. Environmentalism doesn't necessarily mean wearing a hair shirt, although buying the very best may not always be possible with one's immediate means.

In any case, getting back to this speaker, he was extremely insightful, but spoke in a very slow monotone with lots of "umms" and "errs" that made it very difficult to follow him. The effect is hypnotic. I have the lecture on my iPod, and play it when I have difficulty sleeping. The insights in it are enough to capture my attention, but the delivery has me nodding off within a few minutes.

Re:Hard to believe

[timeOday]

Hmm, I was about to speculate the opposite - the new robotic stuff is probably too perfect, lacking the flaws that we think of as craftsmanship or authenticity. Like how women don't want man-made diamonds even though the only difference is they're flawless. And just like audiophiles who stick to LPs and vacuum tubes despite all evidence of their inferiority because, hey, what kind of enthusiast am I if I use the same equipment as everybody else?

Re:Hard to believe

[Faerunner]

No, the "diamond thing" is nothing more than a fantasy spread by De Beers and friends to turn a tidy profit from exploiting diamond mines in Africa. Where did you pull this "social test" BS? 100 years ago nobody gave a shit about diamond rings. Search "De Beers Diamond Ad campaign". There are plenty of sources for this.

Women want "real" diamonds because that's what the media tells them they should love. Something "real", not "fake" (yes, I know they're real diamonds. Don't get me started on the masses' lack of chemistry skill) - A Diamond is Forever!(tm) but a "lab diamond" seems to represent an artificial love (as if the real thing doesn't!). The sacrifice of buying a diamond says only that the man handing it to you is thoughtful enough to buy into the best marketing scheme ever conceived.

Mine bought me a small sapphire which I helped to pick out and love dearly because it represents a lot more than his determination to provide me with what is probably the most expensive status symbol I'll ever have, right at the beginning of the relationship (once you've blown 3k on a single ring, it sets quite the precedent for other gifts!)... it tells me he cares more about our long-term financial stability than about a colorless chunk of rock.

Re:Hard to believe

[tombeard]

The Sam Vimes "Boots" Theory of Economic Injustice runs thus:

At the time of Men at Arms, Samuel Vimes earnt thirty-eight dollars a month as a Captain of the Watch, plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots, the sort that would last years and years, cost fifty dollars. This was beyond his pocket and the most he, Vimes, could hope for was an affordable pair of boots costing ten dollars, which might with luck last a year or so before he, Vimes, would need to resort to makeshift cardboard insoles so as to prolong the moment of shelling out another ten dollars.

Therefore over a period of ten years, he, Vimes, might have paid out a hundred dollars on boots, twice as much as the man who could afford fifty dollars up front ten years before. And he would still have wet feet.

(http://wiki.lspace.org/wiki/Sam_Vimes_Theory_of_Economic_Injustice)

Re:Deskilling 101

[Anonymous Coward]

What we really need is for people to RTFA before they comment.

better than unemployment

[Anonymous Coward]

Given how long I've been out of work, I'd take any offer of employment at this point. Punch cards would be swell.

CS Bachelor's degree and 20 years experience mean jack shit in this economy.

Re:better than unemployment

[negRo_slim]

If you have not made it to management

Spoken like a true fucktard.

Re:better than unemployment

[beelsebob]

And you sir, are exactly why we have so few good, experienced programmers out there. There's an inbuilt assumption that people can't possibly want to write code, and be good at it. If you haven't got to management in 20 years, you must suck, rather than being incredibly good at what you do, and enjoy it.

Re:better than unemployment

[MacGyver2210]

I like to code. I think it's a sort of digital puzzle - I've been doing it for decades now and I'm nowhere near tired of it. I will readily turn down promotion from my coding position because I have no desire to spend all day looking at other people's code and telling them how to do their job.

I also love old style electronic computers which have to be programmed by switches or - gasp! - punch cards. I think the fact that they were able to achieve the same computing 30+ years ago without all the modern technolo-crap is cool, and I feel like everyone who programs should know it at least a little bit.

Even if you program Java, C#, and all manner of simple managed code all your life, they're going to make you learn Assembly and Binary math if you go get a CS degree.

Programmer?

[Kaz Kylheku]

Is it programming if the output is basically a copy of the program?

Or is it data entry?

To BBC's credit, nowhere does "program" appear in the original article.

Business basics

[AliasMarlowe]

The evidence is generally for faster/cheaper.

Indeed. Business 101 teaches us that "cheap shit drives good shit out of the market" in a race to the bottom. Business 201 modifies this slightly by noting that statutory regulations and standards usually place a lower bound on how shitty stuff can get. MBA courses subsequently add an "unfortunately" to the latter observation.

Re:Business basics

[Anonymous Coward]

Your "cheap shit drives good shit out of the market" idea is not Business 101. It's nothing more than short-term thinking on display. It's short-term thinking that has sent our IT jobs offshore. It's short-term thinking that has sent the majority of our manufacturing jobs offshore. It's short-term thinking that lays off employees to create non-existent profits rather than engaging in more research and development to create more income through new or improved products.

It's short-term thinking that has sent so many jobs overseas that we have drastically reduced the buying power of our own economy and sent millions of people into long-term unemployment. You can call all this shit Business 101 all you want. I call it flat out stupidity.

Re:Business basics

[hitmark]

I wonder how much the "cheap shit" issue have to do with readily available credit.

With hard to obtain credit, one would see things as more of an investment and therefor try to get more out of each unit of currency.

But with cheap credit it is all to easy to just go "if it breaks, i'll just buy a new one".

And it's probably not helping that spare parts are more expensive. That is: if one buy the parts and try to assemble a second device, one can not match the price of the first, fully assembled, device.

Re:Business basics

[Znork]

It all depends on your frame of reference

Unfortunately, the frame of reference of several significant players in the system is decidedly mainly local. The theory of globalization you express works until you add fixed currencies, central banks acting on local variables in a global system and government + CB enforced borrowing on a local basis.

a great time for innovative companies to form and produce new goods

That certainly wouldn't hire local labour. Local labour growth will be limited to the kind of society for creative anachronism theme-park work mentioned in the article (or at the Federal Reserve).

That uncertainty rather than outsourcing is why the unemployment won't go down.

Lack of demand is why unemployment won't go down, and demand driven by credit is unlikely to recover any time soon. People have figured out that the state isn't going to save for them, their retirement schemes will probably be bankrupt by the time they need them, and their house isn't going to recover it's ATM function any time soon. With the last 20 years of artificially induced massive overspending there's a fairly severe economic hole to fill in before demand recovers to anywhere near baseline.

Re:Business basics

[Anonymous Coward]

If everything was still being done in the USA, that same computer would be costing them $3000, and the difference (call it $2500) is all money is available to buy goods and services that the person could not have afforded if they had to spend the $3000 on their computer.

But that same person would surely earn enough to afford that $3000 computer AND the other goods and services, if real wages weren't in decline due to globalization.

Re:Business basics

[complete loony]

Lack of demand is why unemployment won't go down, and demand driven by credit is unlikely to recover any time soon.

Bingo. Increasing demand creates jobs. Demand can be calculated by summing income (ie GDP) plus change in debt, if you borrow money and spend or invest it this increases demand. Therefore the change in demand can be calculated by measuring the change in GDP plus [change in [change in debt]]. So if you want to know what the employment situation will be like, look at the acceleration of the aggregate debt level. In the last year, total demand dropped about 17% in the US, so I wouldn't hold out much hope for employment getting any better in the near future.

Re:Computer programming via punch cards is useful

[plover]

But an entire school year spent in front of a keypunch machine, submitting jobs to an IBM 370, when there were rooms full of 3270 terminals all over the place? No thanks. I dropped that class that afternoon.

I'd been programming on terminals for several years before college, and one of my first college classes required us to punch cards as well. I'll say it's worth the experience, once, but you did the right thing in avoiding a whole year of it.

In some respects, punch cards are to teaching programming as film is to teaching photography. The problem is that the cost of any operation is high (you had to wait hours for your results in the case of punch cards, just as film was very expensive) so you did things differently. You'd waste hours of time scouring your deck for syntax errors. Or you'd take only one photo of an interesting scene, saving those other 35 exposures for other interesting scenes.

With digital photography, you can take a dozen shots with different settings in hopes that one will turn out spectacular. With compilers being virtually instant, practices like test driven development are possible, where you write a test, bang out some code to pass it, then move on.

I always think it's good to know about the past, but that doesn't mean we should remain stuck living in it.