Punch cards? Luxury! The fourth computer I worked on was the Burroughs
E-101. You had to program that by sticking metal pins into a board made of
some kind of Bakelite plastic, and jam the board into one of a few
positions on the computer. The boards were expensive, so to run a new
program you usually had to literally disassemble an old one.
The first machines were punch-card machines. The guy I worked for was quite
advanced: we kept all our software on magnetic tape and submitted our jobs
on small decks of cards with command cards and a few edit cards. I recall
one time I was submitting a job down in the Top Secret underground at
Strategic Air Command. Also coming in to run his program was a Major
pushing a cart with tray upon tray of cards for his job. I was carrying a
little deck in my hand.
"What's that tiny job you're running," he asked. "I've got the
BIGDEALCLASSIFIED Jovial program here."
"Well, I'm going to remake the IBSYS operating system with some IBM patches
they sent us, and then fix a bug I found in the FORTRAN compiler, and then
run my test program that calculates great circle distances on the earth," I
answered, pointing to colored sections in my deck.
"Oh."
The most amazing part of all of this was that we had to walk to work
through six feet of snow, uphill, both ways, from the paper bag in the
middle of the road where we had to live. And this was in June!
Well, OK, I lied about that last part. Actually I drove a Jaguar to work,
on days when it ran. My long life of spending too much money on interesting
cars started early. As did my interest in the cutting edge of software
development. Through a circuitous, not to say tortured route, I wound up
here.
Ron Jeffries
www.XProgramming.com
Comments lie. Code doesn't.
On Tuesday, November 9, 2004, at 2:23:33 PM, Stede Troisi wrote:
> By the way, I was looking through one of your threads
> where someone said you were not a good/experienced
> programmer and you listed all the systems and
> languages you worked on! I almost hit the floor.
> Impressive! Where any of the machines you worked on
> using punch cards? I just couldn't have been a
> programmer during the old days.
End quotation from Stede Troisi, on Tuesday, November 9, 2004, at 2:23:33 PM
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