On 22/2/14, Bob W-PDML, discombobulated, unleashed: >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.
Clearly you didn't do this for kicks. -- Cheers, Cotty ___/\__ Broadcast, Corporate, || (O) | Web Video Production ---------- <www.seeingeye.tv> _____________________________ -- 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.
