On 2026-03-01 08:35, bluewater emailtoilet.com via cctalk wrote:
Punchcards? You want punchcards? I got punchcards. Not exactly what I think you
are looking for but a large sample. Please check outwww.punchcardarchive.com
Check the Stats page for a quick summary. Beware the Album page. It takes a
while to load. After all, it has to display 25532 cards.
Not a full program but doing a search on CCROS in the Title field will show a
few cards that represent a few bits of a read only S/360 program.
Donald
-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Lewis via cctalk<[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, February 28, 2026 11:34 PM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts<[email protected]>
Cc: Steve Lewis<[email protected]>
Subject: [cctalk] Operating system, on punch cards?
So studying about 1960s operating systems recently, it occurred to me that
the ASR-33 wasn't really "a thing" until the late 1960s. Yes, they
technically existed since 1963, but even going through 1960s Datamation issues
- you don't see a lot of ads or mention of ASR-33 until 1965.
The IBM 1050 maybe existed in 1961 for the IBM 709, but even so - general
thought is that CTSS (operating system) was largely initially developed using
punch cards.
So - are there any archives or collections of these original punch cards?
Or are they essentially all gone/destroyed, since in general after some code was
"perfected" it was likely then archived to tape?
Anyway, apologies - it was just something that only recently occurred to me,
that basically all of the original operating systems originated on punch cards:
CTSS, Supervisor, AOSP, SCOPE, even MULTICs. So - do any of
those decks of cards still exist in archive? Would be neat to see a photo
of those - except it would be a shoebox of punch cards like any other, I
suppose.
Or is this wrong, and the top tier teams making these OS's, probably had
teletypes and all the magnetic tape they wanted?
-Steve
This thread reminds me of a situation I once found myself in.
I worked for an engineering company that also had a general data
processing dept. The engineers used a PDP-11 and the Business people
used a PDP-8.
I was designing a ham radio repeater controller, and managed to get the
local Motorola SPS rep to donate an evaluation kit, together with the
loan of the compiler. It was on 2000 punch cards of Fortran source!
Problem was, the Fortran compiler was on the PDP-11, and the card reader
was on the PDP-8
Both had removable disks and floppies, but with different sector sizes,
non-interchangeable! The only common peripheral was paper tape!
In the end, the chief engineer (also a ham) and I fed the cards into the
PDP-8, punched paper tape, fed the paper tape in real time into the
PDP-11 and saved it to disk. Because the PDP-8's punch was faster than
the PDP-11 we had to stop and start the processors to avoid overruns and
underruns!
Amazingly, the program compiled first time and we had several years use
out of it, both at work and at home when I got my own PDP-11
cheers
Nigel
--
Nigel Johnson, MSc., MIEEE, VE3ID/G4AJQ/VA3MCU
Amateur Radio, the origin of the open-source concept!
Oh what a mangled head received when first we fractals do perceive
