On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 9:09 AM, Joseph H Winterton <[email protected]> wrote:
> As an early day "hacker" in college, me and a few buddies took a card and
> punched every hole out, then reproduced that card till we had a few
> decks, then put one deck in the keypunch machine to reproduce, another
> deck in each sorting machine and each printer in the room. Started them
> all and boy did that make some sounds as those machines danced around the
> room. The computer science professor soon arrived to stop the stress test
> of the machines. ;-)
Tsk. In COLLEGE? When I was 5, my dad rented a keypunch so he could work on a
project at home (machine generation of concordances). I thought we had a
computer in the house, and spent many a happy hour making all-punch cards. And
jamming the machine with them. And learning how to un-jam it...
ObRelatedAnecdote: And of course, we who were around in those days know that
"chad" was a mass noun ("a bucket of chad") until the 2000 elections, when the
know-nothing press turned it into a count noun ("a bucket of chads").
As for sorting dropped cards: in the mid-80s, I worked at UofWaterloo. We had
one full professor who refused to get off of cards. The I/O operators noticed
that they weren't sequenced or striped, and tried swapping out one of his boxes
for another, then "tripping" and throwing them across the room. That got him to
stripe them, but he still wouldn't get off them. Finally we told him he'd have
to pay for the maintenance on the card reader; that got his Dean to tell him
"adapt or die" (or something like that).
...phsiii (hey, this is at least IBM mainframe-related stuff!)
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