On Friday, December 28, 2001, at 10:15 PM, Bob Miller wrote:
> 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. Yeah, punch cards may not have been that hip, but the types of things that were going on at berkeley, mit, carnegie mellon and some of those places around the days of *nix development seems like it would have been fun to participate in. Computing with a completely different mind set, no corporate control! Jim > > 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] >
