24 Mar
2016
24 Mar
'16
7:13 p.m.
On 21 March 2016 at 17:43, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com> wrote:
On Tuesday, 22 March 2016 at 1:11:07 +1100, Dave
Horsfall wrote:
I did that religiously, even with my small PL/C runs -- PL/C runs were
free. One day, they decided to extend the code area to the entire
card.... and so I learned another feature of the card punch.
N.
Walking down the corridors of Comp Sci, a student in front of me
dropped his entire deck of approx 2000 cards, all over the floor...
I have no idea whether he got them sorted, but I sure as hell used
rubber bands after that!
But that's what the sequence numbers in columns 73 to 80 are for!
Greg
--
24 Mar
24 Mar
7:54 p.m.
New subject: Early non-Unix filesystems?
On Mar 24, 2016, at 2:13 PM, Nemo
<cym224(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 21 March 2016 at 17:43, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com> wrote:
The joy of drum cards.
On Tuesday, 22 March 2016 at 1:11:07 +1100, Dave
Horsfall wrote:
I did that religiously, even with my small PL/C runs -- PL/C runs were
free. One day, they decided to extend the code area to the entire
card.... and so I learned another feature of the card punch.
Walking down the corridors of Comp Sci, a student in front of me
dropped his entire deck of approx 2000 cards, all over the floor...
I have no idea whether he got them sorted, but I sure as hell used
rubber bands after that!
But that's what the sequence numbers in columns 73 to 80 are for! 
26 Mar
26 Mar
9:05 p.m.
New subject: Early non-Unix filesystems?
I had for 25 years on my desk the program drum (complete with a card wrapped around it)
that I snagged as a souvenir from the last keypunch machine at Rutgers. It was extremely
rare that anybody ever understood what it was. Sometimes, I even had to explain what a
punched card was.
The joy of drum cards.
9:34 p.m.
New subject: Early non-Unix filesystems?
On Sat, Mar 26, 2016 at 2:05 PM, Ronald Natalie <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
I had for 25 years on my desk the program drum
(complete with a card
wrapped around it) that I snagged as a souvenir from the last keypunch
machine at Rutgers. It was extremely rare that anybody ever understood
what it was. Sometimes, I even had to explain what a punched card was.
An aerospace company gets a big military contract to produce a new fighter
aircraft. During the design process it was realized that aircraft weight
issues were going to be a major ongoing issue, so they appointed a manager
to track weight across all of the engineering groups so that problems could
be detected and corrected early. The newly appointed manager checks in with
all of the group managers and collects current estimates and trend data.
Eventually, he gets to the Avionics Software group and asks for their
weight data.
"Um. Zero."
"What? Aren't you putting software onto the fighter?"
"Yes"
"Well, how much will it weigh?"
"Zero."
Exasperated, the Weight Manager points to a deck of punch cards on the desk.
"There... That's software, right?"
"Yes..."
"How much do the cards weigh?"
"Ahh. You don't understand. We only use the holes."
-- Charles
10:09 p.m.
New subject: Early non-Unix filesystems?
"Ahh. You don't understand. We only use the holes.”
Well actually, that’s pretty accurate. The holes are the significant part.
I had some corporate guys come down to talk about doing interfacility collaboration on
Engineering projects. They’d identified this networked manufacturing configuration
system and though we could use it to manage our 750,000 line code base in our products.
They seemed to thing a file was just a part. I pointed out we were already using a
distributed software configuration management system (Clearcase Multisite) and if they
wanted to expand that to some more sites, I’d be glad to help.
28 Mar
28 Mar
8:32 p.m.
New subject: Early non-Unix filesystems?
A Canadian friend of mine had a similar problem. He had been working in
the US for several years, and was returning to his new job in Canada, his
car filled with dozens of boxes of punched cards. The Canadian Customs
officers told him he would need to pay a duty (as I recall, it was fairly
stiff for the day--$5 a box or so) and my friend argued in vain for quite
a few minutes. Finally, he opened one of the boxes and said "look, these
all have data on them. They aren't useful for anything..." and the
customs officer said "Oh. These are USED cards. That's OK. No duty!"
"Ahh. You don't understand. We only use the holes."
-- Charles
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days inactive
2948
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5 comments
5 participants
participants (5)
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Charles Anthony -
Milo Velimirović -
Nemo -
Ronald Natalie -
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