Many years ago, after becoming increasingly frustrated with a magazine publisher who kept sending me incorrect bills on 80-column cards, and who would not do anything to correct "their" mistake, I ran the card from the most recent bill through a card replicator, interpreted the output, and then added a couple of selected holes to the original, which I then mailed back to the publisher in the supplied envelope.
Less than a week later, I received a telephone call from a data processing manager employed by the magazine publisher who was suddenly very interested in solving the problem. It seemed that their nightly batch cycle had abended when the program tried to cut a check with five (5) non-zero digits to the left of the decimal place. I told the manager that I was simply dumfounded as to how those extra holes appeared in that 80-column card. After all, I didn't know anything whatsoever about computers. (And if you believe that last comment, I have some prime acreage about 100 miles to the east of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, that you may be interested in.) The really difficult part was my obviously unsuccessful attempt to keep the manager from hearing my laughter during the telephone call. John P Baker Software Engineer -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ed Gould Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2006 23:47 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: What's a "programming language" (was: Google ... ) Ed: That would have been (nasty) but fun to see the company trying to balance the accounts. I don't recall ever seeing a place where I worked a "return" item that was read by punch card type machine. I would expect it to be a nasty job that no operator would ever want to do, but I don't know any masochists . The closest I have seen is an OCR reader and I don't recall any "funny" stories. I think the strangest was when I worked for a magazine publisher and back in the 1960's people would wrap the insert card in magazines around a brick. We would have to pay postage for the brick. I think it took several years for the magazine to get the USPO to change the rules for those items. My memory says the PO really put up a fight against the proposed rules. The employees got free copies of all the mags (except 1 and that was reserved for management). The amount of postage free cards was almost ridiculous . I don't subscribe to any of them currently but if they are anything like other magazines there are probably more now. Ed ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
