OK, another punch card story.

In the early days of SCCS, when it was a SNOBOL4 program running on an IBM mainframe, my officemate, Alan Glasser, and I provided tech support, and a user came to our office with a bug: It had processed the same card twice. SCCS listed all the commands on the printout, and, sure enough, the command had been processed twice.

Alan, who was smarter than me, had no explanation, and neither did I. I said to the user: "You know, there are all kinds of bugs, some pretty weird, but that just isn't the kind of bug that I would have. Just not possible."

Finally, I think it was Alan who said: "Bring us your deck."

The user returned a few minutes later, and we examined the deck. The command card was in there twice.

Nailed it, and it only took us an hour.

--Marc Rochkind

On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 5:27 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@lemis.com> wrote:

On Wednesday, 23 March 2016 at 16:47:53 -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
> ...
> At that point, my coworker came out and said, here bring me your
> deck. He looked at them and quickly said -- "The problem is you
> used the wrong color cards."????

Nice one. Reminds me of a non-computer story from round the same
time, probably round 1968. A friend of mine in Malaysia had long
hair, fashionable amongst kids at the time, and prohibited in
Singapore. He wanted to go to Singapore, but how to get in without
cutting his hair? He was Indian (Tamil), so he had the bright idea of
buying a turban and posing as a Sikh, who were exempted from the
regulation on cultural grounds.

He arrived at the Causeway in Johore Bahru with his nice red turban
on. And the immigration official was a Sikh! With a blue turban. He
said "what are you doing with a red turban? Today's a blue turban
day!".

Greg
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