On Tue, Dec 1, 2015 at 2:41 PM, Barry Merrill <[email protected]> wrote: > I think a box of 2000 IBM cards is on the order of 6 pounds, > so a TON of JCL cards would be 333 boxes, or about 666,666 > card images. > > But, the useful weight is zero, since we only use the holes. > > Barry > > <grin> Since this is a thread well suited to reminiscence, I will relay this story.
My father managed a very large IBM data center in the 70's. Huge floor space, and a very large room to store blank punched cards. One of the systems programmers who worked there was a cranky joke-ster. He would read every month in the company newsletter about monetary employee suggestion awards handed out for suggestions that he thought were silly and banal. Like: - there is an extra phone on some desk that is not needed - unnecessary copies of some large daily report were being printed - .... The companies policy was that employee suggestions would be reviewed, first by corporate, and then by the line manager in charge of implementation. The employee would get a cash award based on some percentage of the first year's savings. My father gets a call one day from a very excited guy in corporate. He says that this systems programmer has submitted a suggestion that will save many tens of thousands of dollars a year in the data center. The suggestion was something like: ========================================================= We store millions of blank punched cards so that they are available when needed for the data center. I have designed and written two assembler programs (see listings attached) that allow us to eliminate this storage requirement. - The first program allows us to read and store a "master image" of a single blank punched card, electronically, on spinning magnetic disk. - The second program can be run, whenever needed, to punch out blank cards from the image stored on disk. A parameter card specifies the count of how many blank cards to punch. ... ========================================================= My father had to gently explain to the corporate guy how he had been suckered. Cheers, Kirk Wolf Dovetailed Technologies http://dovetail.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
