Bob W-PDML wrote: >When I got my first programming job, in 1982, it was at a site which ran an >old ICL mainframe. We had a paper-roll teletype, and submitted jobs on >paper-tape, including our source code, which was either COBOL or the ICL >assembler, called PLAN, which we wrote in pencil on coding sheets. > >These were punched to tape by a roomful of data prep clerks, all women, many >of whom could read the tape very easily. The other 2 programmers and I had to >learn to read it well enough to be able to find the segments we had to cut out >where there were compilation errors. > >We also had to punch the corrections by hand with a spike on a kind of clamp >thing, then sellotape that segment back into place on the rest of the tape. > >You had to be very careful with your coding and your cutting and splicing >because we only got one day a week on the computer, Tuesday evenings after >5pm, when we stayed till about midnight. > >For short tapes used for job control (not JCL, which was an IBM thing) when >you'd got the tape right you could copy it to a strip of expensive blue tape, >which was reinforced and could stand to be run over and over, whereas the >ordinary tape would break after a few runs. It was very impressive to watch a >program you'd written processing the tape, and once you'd run it a few times >you could tell by the rhythm which part of the program was executing. >
We had to live in a cardboard box in the middle of the road... -- Mark Roberts - Photography & Multimedia www.robertstech.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
