OT : Page size change?

What days???

I can remember having four guys push two large railroad luggage carts loaded with punch cards to the computer room to run some data for me and produce a report. We had to work at night because the task took over five hours and tied up the computer completely. Nothing and nobody in the company could use the computer while we were working. One night the guys pushing the carts took a turn too fast and dumped one of the carts on it's side. I forget how many hours were spent feeding those damn cards into a sorting machine to get them back in order - close as I have ever come to having a heart attack!! IIRC the data that was punched onto the cards was in Hexi-code because I still have a paper copy of the fortran program I wrote that ran the data and it has a notation on the cover for data not to exceed four hexi columns. There were only 80 columns on a punch card back then. I thought that it couldn't get any better when we went mag-tape.LOL One of the smartest men I knew was a Polish guy that could read or write hexi-code faster than you would ever believe. I can't remember but he could probably +-* and / in hexi also. A kin to doing math in Roman numerals.

Believe me those were not the days Roman or other wise! LOL

Fred

aaahhhhh!!!! Not punch cards.........................the horror.....Horror.......HORROR!!!

I remember those darn things from 1st yr for B.Sc. of Computing Science. Also know how much fun it was when they were spilled.

You were spoiled, if you had the sorter available. Still not the best methods available now; but far, far, better than those fun time-consuming ancient times.

Translation for the younger "Folks." It was like when we still had to "wear our wings" when we flew, while staying away from the sun so our wings would not melt having us fall into the sea.

LMAO

It might be worthwhile reminding people how punch cards were "invented". In the late 19th century, it took nearly 8 years to analyse the results of the US population census, which, by law, occurred every 10 years. A young German engineer, Hollerith, was given the job of "automating" the system. Which he did, with punch cards. The US needed some 80 million high quality cards, and were stuck as to how to produce them. At that time, the size of the US paper currency had been reduced, and the US mint had a stock of moulds that produced the old size of paper. These were used to produce the punch cards, which were the size of the old US dollar bills. Just a bit of history. Jim.

They were never the size of any U.S. currency I ever saw. Britsh pounds maybe, but dollar bills in my lifetime have always measured about 2-1/2 x 6.

I don't know about the size of our money during the revolution.

Going back on topic: Hollerith got the idea of his cards from the Jacquard loom which used punched cards and was itself an improvement on Jacques de Vaucanson's loom produced in 1745!

Closer to home would be

Hey, great minds think alike !

Precisely. The date of the change was circa 1880. Jim.

It was easier to get things back in order if I could get the girls to set it up so that whatever was punched on the cards was also printed along the top edge - but it was like pulling chicken's teeth. You can well imagine what it was like looking for a misplaced or a missing "comma" or other syntax error in 5000 to 10000 cards and when the ink started to run out on the printer commas and other characters didn't get printed on the cards. Actually 5000 to 10000 cards was not too bad but try looking the squirrely nuts in a million or two cards - how do you spell nightmare in swear words. LOL

So refresh my brain cells. Did the card reader have sixteen reader pins or more?? IIRC hexi-code needed sixteen reader pins, at least it did on one computer that I had. IIRC cards were read left to right and the first seven holes were for some kind of machine instruction which left only 73 out of 80 columns for info. Seems to me some email windows are still restricted to 80 characters to this day.

Fred

IBM 80 column card had 12 columns, that and several other standards are given here

No, not hex. The cards were decimal, 0 to 9, with three extra holes at the top of each of the 80 columns. The original IBM computers had a simple way to read 72 columns at a time, so for computer work, only these

Great bit of history. My freshman year, I remember one of my frat brothers doing his Math/Comp Sci degrees, starting his grad research - and carting around many boxes of cards at a time. We were always worried - and he threatened the lives of many of us over those cards. Personally, I was always trying to remember to number my code lines so that when the inevitable spill happened it might be easier to resort. Ugh. Was quite glad when the "terminal" room took completely over the key-punches. Though, for a while, you could use either. Remember turning in decks/boxes of cards

- and being told when your run would be done? I remember sitting in the hallway with a couple of classmates, waiting for the print-out of some really difficult Stochastic processes simulation homework - and being offered from $150 up to $300 for each problem - by some shall we say less successful students in the class (with more money than willingness to work hard).

ellice

I thought the print setting for the top row was just a switch on the machine. I honestly think where I was, that was the default - can't imagine not having it turned on.

Personally, I had my years of huge code in grad school, and just reading it was enough- on print-out. Didn't help that my idiot advisor thought that I had all the info I needed for this code to work - forget that I couldn't find definitions for the many variables, and some geometry stuff. Turned out that I wasn't crazy - there was a nearly 200 page report issued by the group which did the basic code, including letting users know they would have to write their own geometry/physics/chemistry for the "combustion" (where the action really is) for this. So many nights reading the thousands of lines to find out I wasn't crazy. But, then, of course, I had to add to it. So, it pointed out to me the value of good comments in code! I'd hate to have been doing a 10,000+ line code in punch cards. This was bad enough. I did get to pay an undergrad to remove a mystery character at the start of every single one of those lines - go figure.

Ellice

Ah, the other 7 columns were for comments, not machine instruction. More like info for the user. Things that were just printed on the line, but had no instruction for the computer. Could include the line #. I remember having some that put the card number in, but still left the comment columns open.

Ellice