On 22 Feb 2014, at 19:02, "Mark Roberts" <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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... >
Bet you didn't have to punch your own holes in it. B -- 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.
