[Coco] Punchcards (was Re: MAMOU bug?)

[Arthur Flexser]

Ah, yes, IBM punchcards.  I did my share of programming on them as
well, starting in high school.  (A tip of the hat also to DEC's
punched paper rolls for program storage.)  I actually was briefly
indignant in the '70s when I was forced to transfer a lot of favorite
FORTRAN
programs to magnetic tapes because my university announced it would
soon scrap its punchcard readers.

My first experience with punch cards was actually in the late '40s
when I was in grade school, in the context of using the Montclair (NJ)
public libraries.  Thomas J. Watson, then
CEO of IBM, lived in Montclair and selected its libraries as the pilot
location for a circulation system based on punchcards.  My library
card consisted of 1/3 of an IBM card, and every book in the library
had a little pocket containing half an IBM card, punched with the
book's identifying information.

When you checked out a book, your library card and the book's card
would get inserted into a special reader simultaneously, resulting in
the generation (at a connected location in the basement of the
library) of a "transaction card," a full IBM card that contained a
record of the book withdrawal.  Neat!

Art


On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 8:30 AM, Rich Carreiro <rlcarr at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 2:36 AM, Mark McDougall <msmcdoug at iinet.net.au> wrote:
>> On 3/02/2013 2:23 PM, Stephen H. Fischer wrote:
>>
>>>> I hit an bit anniversary last month, 40 years since I wrote my first
>>>> program. It was with punch cards too.
>>
>>
>> I'm going to play this game too. 34 years for me. TRS-80 BASIC.
>>
>> I missed out on punched cards by 1 year at uni. Can't say that I'm
>> disappointed in any way.
>
> I wrote my first program in 1979 in Level 2 BASIC on a TRS-80 Model I,
> so 34 years here.  Got my battleship grey 16K CoCo with extended BASIC
> the year that was available, then moved up to a 64K CoCo 2 when it came
> out and had lots of fun with it (wished I'd kept all my Chromasette issues...)
> Used the CoCo all through junior high and high school and my freshman year
> at MIT for writing papers, too (can't remember the program -- maybe
> Telewriter? --
> but it used the PMODE 4 mode to do 80 character per line on-screen formatting.
> Not easy to look at but it got the job done.
>
> Then got an Amiga 1000 in either Spring 1985 or 86 and stayed in the Amiga
> family all the way to an A3000, but finally switched over to Linux on
> x86 hardware
> in 1995.
>
> I *have* done punchcard programming.  In high school of all places.  After
> doing Pascal on TRS-80 Model IIIs my junior year, I took FORTRAN my senior
> year.  That was done using the mainframe in the basement of the school and
> was FORTRAN-66 which was old even by 1985 standards.  And we had to do
> it all on punchcards.  (And then for the final quarter of the year we had to do
> COBOL.  Oh my god, what a horrid language...)
>
> --
> Rich Carreiro             rlcarr at gmail.com
>
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