Subject:
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"Why, in my day..."
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.geek
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Date:
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Sun, 25 Jul 1999 17:52:44 GMT
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Viewed:
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1277 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.geek, Larry Pieniazek <lar@voyager.net> writes:
> [...]
> (why, I remember when I had to do my programs on punched cards... once
> you punch it. there's NO undo!...
Heh heh, I think I remember hearing about someone who took a precision knife
to a punched and changed a D into an E by altering the lowest order bit.
IIRC, punched cards were easier to do that sort of thing to than paper tape
because punched cards always made these little rectangular holes on top of
pre-printed letters, so you knew exactly where to cut. :)
> and I had to walk to school. Barefoot
> in the snow, uphill both ways (1).
Hey, you forgot, "And I liked it!". :)
> Why, back then some of us coded with
> just ones! Zero hadn't been invented yet.)
Suzanne pokes fun at me whenever I go off on another "Why, in my day..."
rant. I can still remember the first time I pressed the letter A on a
keyboard and saw it show up on the screen. My jaw dropped; then I started
bouncing in my chair. I couldn't believe it -- pictures from light!
It was one of those old light-blue phosphor terminal screens with really
thick scan lines that you could drive a truck between:
___
(___)
(_) (_)
(_) (_)
(_)_____(_)
(_________)
(_) (_)
(_) (_)
Musta been about '73 or '74, 'cause I wouldda been about 6 or 7. It was
amazing to be able to erase letters right on the screen (with the RUB OUT
key :) after a year of playing monkey-business on punched-card machines...
My sister and I would sit at dueling punch-card terminals and see how many
cards of full of random garbage we could print up before the loud clock on
the wall ticked again (you could hear it even amidst all the terminal and
tape-drive noise). At first we learned we could bang out letters quickly by
alternating hands on the home row keys -- garbage like this:
JASKDFJASDFKJKLASDFJKLASFKLASJDFKLJASDKLFJASKLJDF
but then we discovered the REPEAT key, which when held caused any other key
to repeat at full speed! So we could now print up something like 8 cards
chock-full of X's in a minute. I think the card would even automatically
eject when the head position got to 80, so we could just hold the keys down
solid. That was Big Fun. :)
Then when we realized that we started having enough cards to take home and
draw flip-movies on (like a few dozen), we started looking for characters
which punched as few holes as possible, and off to the side/top. It wasn't
long then, in the quest for "empty" cards, before we discovered the card-
eject key -- this caused the terminal to spit out a blank card without
having imprinted anything on it. Now we could just hold this button down
and get cards out really quick! (At about one card every two seconds, we
never thought of looking for refill stacks.)
That got pretty boring after a while, though, and during a trip to the candy
machine one evening, we noticed these big open bins of dry-trash (in those
days there wasn't much recycling and this particular company didn't shred
either). Now we were able to comb through thousands and thousands of cards
to find good ones to write on...much more challenging. Plus some of them
said interesting words like CLOOP and PLOOP.
That must've been about when we invented a game where you took a bunch of
random cards and held them in a stack and saw how many holes still showed
light through. Whoever had the taller stack (by counting) that still showed
light through at least one hole won that round.
It wasn't long after that before we figured out how to duplicate entire
cards with the card-duplication feature on the terminals... You write
something random on one card, put it in the card-duplication stack, initiate
the duplicate-stack function, and now you have two identical cards. Then
you repeat, and now you have four identical cards. Repeat again, and now
you have eight. Then sixteen, then thirty-two, and so on and so on until
the card-refill cache is empty. :-) That was a fun way to start learning
about powers of two.
Probably about then (after a few weeks of tagging along with Dad after
dinner on crunch-mode evenings), we were asked not to root through the trash
anymore or waste cards, and were introduced to the light-display terminals.
I don't think we were able to do any harm there, plus there were some fun
games to play like touch-screen Tic-Tac-Toe.
Ahh, the good old days.
> 1 - this part about uphill both ways happens to be true for my High
> School. I lived on a hilltop on one side of the valley, my school was on
> a hilltop on the other side of that valley, so I had to ride *out* of
> the valley, and thus uphill, both ways
So it was downhill too, then, right? :-)
--Todd
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: learning languages (was: Re: Perl rules!)
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| (...) It's a relative thing. Back then, Algol 60 hadn't even been developed, and FORTRAN hadn't been muddied up with more stuff. (why, I remember when I had to do my programs on punched cards... once you punch it. there's NO undo!... and I had to (...) (25 years ago, 25-Jul-99, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
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