----------------------<snip>--------------------
My first job in the computer field was a part time job as the night
shift computer operator with Mead Packaging while I was in college. They
had just replaced their IBM 1401 with an IBM 360/30. Even though they
had tape drives the payroll master was on cards. Each Friday I would get
a deck of change cards from the payroll department, sort them down, and
then run them and the master deck through a collator. I was in mortal
fear of dropping the master deck. Since I had time on my hands during my
shift I decided to write a program to do what the sort/collate process
did and got that stupid filing cabinet full of cards onto a tape.
Everyone there thought I had done something marvelous. They didn't think
that the main payroll program could process from a tape.
----------------------<unsnip>--------------------
Waxing nostalgic: I started using a old 026 keypunch, in 1969. Finally
got the computer center to by a pair of 029's, so we could stop
multi-punching EBCDIC on those old BCDIC machines., then went to a 129.
I also played with BASIC on a System/3 and still have a box of those
wierd little three-row cards, with the tiny round holes in a few. Each
"row" could hold up to 6 punches. 96 columns in three rows; imagine
that. The good (?) old days!
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