Back in my days as a trainee operator, dropping a tray (remember those grey trays of 2000 or so cards?) was known as a 'floor sort'.
AT Another place I worked at had the only 2540 I've ever seen. ISTR a program that validated data cards 'on the fly', sending valid cards to output hopper 1 and invalid ones to hopper 2... which was fine until the validation program was enhanced & the list of tests took longer than the allowable time to trigger the selector flap(s - or whatever they were called) on the reader path. That led to some WONderful wrecks when the flap popped up just as the incoming card reached that point on the track. John Compton -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Phil Smith III Sent: 27 May 2009 14:43 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Book on Poughkeepsie 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!) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
