Jim Beard wrote: > As someone else lamented, I feel like I missed out by not seeing the > punch card days.
I experienced punch cards. Here's what you missed. 1. Correcting a typo was not easy. If you typed the wrong character in column 57, then you'd get a new card, duplicate the first card onto the new one through column 56, and then start typing again. The process encouraged very slow and careful typing. 2. If you dropped a deck of cards, you could spend a couple of hours putting them back in order. If you were wise enough to put sequence numbers on your cards, you could feed them through a card sorter, a machine about seven or eight feet long by one foot wide, that read the numbers in a single column and sorted the cards into ten bins. Repeat for each digit of your sequence numbers (typically eight). It would still take ten-fifteen minutes to sort 1,000 cards. 3. 1,000 cards is twice as big as a shoe box. It's also 78 kilobytes. You could fit about a floppy's worth of data in your VW Beetle's back seat; or about two floppies' worth in the trunk of your '72 Impala. Zip cartridge == panel truck. 4. Chad was readily available. Bushels and bushels of it. It was only good for practical jokes and as a confetti substitute at weddings. 5. In a typical day of programming, you'd throw away on the order of a thousand pages of fanfold printer paper. Nobody had heard of recycling paper. "The Good Old Days" is just as oxymoronic as "Microsoft Works". -- Bob Miller K<bob> kbobsoft software consulting http://kbobsoft.com [EMAIL PROTECTED]
