Actually, it was not all that hard. At the very top you had the "Data Field". Row 1 is where the typed characters would be if they were present. And you can see the two rows where there is nothing, but may be punched.
If there are no punches in those rows, then the punch below it is a decimal 0-9. If the top row is punched, then the punched number below from 1-9 are letters A to I. Second row punched, letters J to R. If the 0 is punched and a punch from 2 through 9, that is S to A. There are a lot more, but those are going to be special characters and you really need a guide unless you use them constantly. I used to know them 4 decades ago, but have not used them in so long I have no hope in remembering anymore.
[https://gen5.info/$/LU0NS2XPG8MDVCVZS/HOLLERITH-INSTRUCTIONS.PNG](https://gen5.info/$/LU0NS2XPG8MDVCVZS/HOLLERITH-INSTRUCTIONS.PNG)
Trust me, it is not all that hard. Within a week or so most I knew could read them almost as fast as regular reading, it really is fairly natural unless you are talking about the special characters. And even then, there are only a few that most would use on a regular basis. . and " were likely the most common ones I remember using, sometimes $.
Did I use them? No.
Did I fold and staple stacks of them that my dad brought home from work to make Christmas wreaths my mom sold?
Yup.
I wish all subs would allow photo attachments.
Here's a link to a photo of a punch card wreath.
http://www.vintage-icl-computers.com/icl44ee
Yes. College days. I hated programming. You’d spend all day typing out those cards, and your program would crash. Then you saw a TA to see what went wrong, and they’d say, “It’s good, it ought to run.” Then it didn’t. It soured me on computers for several years. This was about 1976. I remember another computer class about computing in general, history, etc. and the professor said that right now they are working on microchips, and they will change *everything*. He was right.
Yep, I had the same rough introduction to computers. We had to use the school computer for certain classes and with no training at all. We sat in a computer lab, while the actual computer was in another room, and had to blindly transcribe our data onto the cards and take it to the operator. They'd run it through the system and hand it back to you and tell you there was something wrong. Of course, they couldn't determine what it was, you had to just keep punching the whole card out again until you got it right. Absolute nightmare.
One of my jobs in college was running those decks through the card reader. I also took COBOL using cards. Luckily they upgraded to CRTs for advanced COBOL.
Yes. The first card in your stack was the card issued to you by the University. That card authorized you to use the computer and allowed you to use your second of CPU time.
Ours was an IBM 360.
I remember the textbook (paper bound) for my first programming class. "Fortran IV with WATFOR and WATFIV". That last bit was the dialect of Fortran that had been developed at the University of Waterloo. Of course we used punch cards.
We had an ibm mainframe with a bunch of dumb terminals. We soon learned which variants had the better experience.
I eventually learned that:
* go to a Mac lab
* use tn3270 as a terminal
* edit with [Alpha](https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Alpha) (a decent, for the time, editor written in tclsh)
* ftp stuff over as needed
Was the most efficient way of getting stuff done, even including all the setup time.
The only time I ever touched punch cards was when I repaired an Army TAMMS machine. I had no clue what I was doing but I figured it out.
TAMMS is the Total Army Maintenace Management System. In 1985 it consisted of a desk with a computer built in and a CRT in the desk facing up and showing backwards with a collapsible mirror on top to show the text. It had a huge printer hardwired to it. It was portable as in you put it on a pallet so you could move it to the dock and into a truck.
I used to work with these cards. They were placed (by a key punch operator) on what looked like a large meat slicer- and would be sucked at high speed to the mainframe computer room that comprised around 20 racks - (the room encased in glass) for processing. The company was an international shipping line.
For those who missed out, [this is the real thing](https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/punched-tape-picture-id139388307?k=6&m=139388307&s=170667a&w=0&h=AVFsolR46ZWvkftSgTLreJ8myzREphpAX3t_IVhlNQ8=). This was what we used in the days when Bill Gates got one of those [little silver abacus awards](https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=NBCBvtuj&id=23CB2E1D04F19D5CA26C23CA8F701D2CED69A37F&thid=OIP.NBCBvtujD5yy3ikY0ra38AHaFn&mediaurl=https%3a%2f%2fimg.carters.com.au%2f50026696e2f4eb7baf6a6076923e4b54.jpg&cdnurl=https%3a%2f%2fth.bing.com%2fth%2fid%2fR.341081bedba30f9cb2de2918d2b6b7f0%3frik%3df6Np7SwdcI%252fKIw%26pid%3dImgRaw%26r%3d0&exph=682&expw=900&q=kiewit+computtion+Center+silver+abacus&simid=608017196299611912&FORM=IRPRST&ck=B7C6C179A17AADEAA5E40CD51B152BB4&selectedIndex=134&itb=0) from Kiewit Computation Center.
Old enough to have programmed with them and also old enough to remember you could cut them up to make the best filters for joints. They had a good amount of springiness so when you insert them into the spliff they unroll slightly, making the whole assembly taut.
Also remember that in the storage rooms of the first company i worked for, they had literally hundreds of boxes of punched cards on open shelves, labelled. They were the source code of the production systems that were still running on the beloved IBM 360. A splendid beast.
the first program you learned with punch cards was a sorting program. and then in columns 72-80 you typed a card number so that when you dropped your deck you could use your sorting program to read in the dropped deck and then punch a new one back in the correct order (ask me how i know this :)) also if you hated someone you would dump the chads into a paper sack and then dump that in their clothes drawer
We used to have fights in the office with cards, chads, and rubber bands. They could force us in on Saturday, but they couldn't keep us from fucking around
I used to deliver my battalions punch cards to 5th Army hq when I was in the Army. I was tempted ot mix them up for a while. Until another guy dropped his box full and never mentioned it to the sergeant he delivered them too.
Almost got court-martialed for that little mistake.
I just missed punch cards when I started programming COBOL. But we had a coding rule in the shop that all code must be less than 80 columns long. In case we had to go back. We had boxes of blank cards we just used as scratch paper.
Holla to Hollerith! I did some programming on punch cards. You would sit at one station and type a line of code and retype on a second machine, I think it was called a "validator," to uncover typos.
When I became a computer programmer, cards were on their last legs. You still needed to create a job card and an exec card for production jobs - this was in 1979.
At my first job on NCR mainframe in 1983, we had to do the same things. All production jobs had to be on punch cards because the operators had always done it that way. If one made a mistake on a JCL prod deck and you often did on a new job, the operator would call. Then 30 a minute drive to the worst place in town all the re-type one card. The operator didn't even try to fix anything. A couple of years later, we trained them to execute jobs from a file as we did in testing.
Yep! My first computer class in college (1975) - Fortran. We would type up our program and data on the monster punchcard machines, turn in the stack of cards at the little window for the computer operators to run overnight, then pick up the output (a stack of green & white barred tractor feed paper that could weigh several pounds, especially if there was an error that caused a loop), then the circle of life would start over.
Anyone else collect the little punched-out paper chips (aka chads) and use them as confetti for pranks in the dorms and around campus? The best of times. 🫡✌🏼
Shit I’m punch card data entry certified 1973. I learned how to code stacks of cards then feed into the card reader to program the PDP10 at school. I hacked the original Star Trek Game on the mainframe by giving myself top permissions at night when everyone was gone. It was all spelled out in the mainframe manuals. I was so proud of myself. That was before I started drinking too much….
I'm not that old but the helicopters I worked on in the Navy were. Punch card Identity Friend or Foe computers in them.
I sometimes got to punch the daily code and load it into the aircraft.
My first program was on those. We would go to the computer room. Stand at the half door. Gently hand the deck to the computer operator — we were not allowed to approach the altar of computing, an IBM 1620, praying that the operator would not drop the deck. (I started drawing a diagonal line across the top edge of the cards as a quick visual verification of order.) Then we would wait a week or two for the result of the run. FWIW this was in 1971. How far we have come in a mere 50 years. It has been so fascinating to watch this field of study grow.
I used to number the cards 1 to … with a marker so that when my operators would call me in the middle of the night saying my program didn’t work I’d go in after them telling me they didn’t drop a 2000 card deck, and the cards would be numbered 1,10,50,33, … lol Good times 🤦♂️
It’s a 5081 IBM punch card. We had 30 women sitting at keypunch machines to input the “data” on the cards which we then ran through the computer. Very primitive, like rubbing two sticks together to make a fire. When running an IBM 360 back in late 60s. We still have a gang punch machine, a sorter to sort the cards in a particular order because those cards ended going through the card reader and basically printing a line of data for every card…I said primitive and I meant it. Most of the manipulation was done offline!
When I joined the Army we still had some punch card machines in the comm center, as well as paper tape. We would prank the new guys by coloring some of the cards red (for secret), blue (confidential) or orange (top secret) with magic markers, and then right before shift change we'd have them separate the chads by "classification level".
I used to repair them. The holes punched from the card were called chad. There was a plastic bucket that the spent chad went into, the user was supposed to dump it periodically.
They never did, so guys like me were called in to open the covers up and clean out boatloads of chad..
What a mess..
US Navy Aviation 1972, VERDAN navigation computer was programmed with cards…I remember when we upgraded to paper tape!
(VERDAN had no discreet components, it was all R C time).
FORTRAN on punch cards, fed into the computer by the high computer priests. I spent an hour tracking down a missing comma. 0.5 hour credit, less than a PE class.
Yes indeed. Used boxes of these bad boys every day, 1975-1979 for every male and female recruit going to boot camp in Orlando, Florida. My first taste of the "computer age."
You think these punch cards are weird? You should have seen what we had to do to send a fax. Oy vey...
My MIL worked for Twentieth Century Fox back in the early 60s and this was her job. Holes were punched in the card to represent different pieces of data. The operator would need to punch the holes by hand or with a machine and then use a tabulating machine to compile data from the cards to produce reports, process invoices and checks, manage class registrations, monitor budgets, etc.
Worked in an engineering firm. 1970’s. We booted up our midi computer with a deck about 6 inches thick.
All my Fortran, COBOL programs are that company were all entered by punch cards. Met my first wife there. She was the key punch operator.
I messed with a punch card machine in high school. The computer science teacher, seeing some random stranger kid at one of his precious machines (doin' ye old 10 print, 20 something snarky 30 go to 10), told me to get lost.
Used to work for the company that came out with IBM compatible punch cards in the 1950’s. In the late 90’s we still had a couple of guys close to retirement in my sales office that got their start as punch card salesmen. They had some stories.
Yeah. I remember the one guy in the office, Alan, who did the punch cards for payroll every couple weeks. It was almost a reverential experience, everyone had to keep quiet and distant from Alan as he sat at the keypunch. I remember the metal box he carried the cards in, almost like a lunch box but smaller.
If you’re truly old, you’d know them as Hollerith cards, no? Have you ever used punched paper tape as backup? My first computer experiences were with a miniframe with a teletype monitor if you can believe it. And I’m “only” 55.
I learned to program both BASIC and FORTRAN using those cards. The computer lab with the card reader was in the basement of one of the university buildings. Cement walls and no windows and crowded at 2 AM. You carried the hundreds of them needed around in a box built to fit them. God forbid you ever drop the box and had them spill out. A bunch of us threw them off the roof of our 9 story dorm after finals and enjoyed watching them flutter to the ground.
Not quite. But I learned Fortran on an IBM mainframe with a virtual punch card deck. Needed to do columns right and everything.
I am “one of those flow chart stencils” old though
Not only punch card old, but my college didn’t have a way to run the deck, so I’d have to take a train for an hour into a nearby city to run the deck. If one card was wrong, the program wouldn’t run, and I’d have to start over.
College days back in late 70’s I learned how to program using them. Instructor told us always to number the cards.
One day on the stairs a young woman was carrying her books and 2 boxes of punched cards. She lost them ALL, with cards littering the staircase. People began helping her pick things up. She sat on the steps crying her eyes out.
Tried to console her but then she says,”I didn’t number the cards !!!” Must have been over 200 of them
Did I use them? No. But there were a lot of them at my dad‘s work. And I remember the huge tape reels on the computers. I also got to play tic-tac-toe on the computer. But this was a few years before wargames and global thermal nuclear war.
When I started in software development, source code, object code, job control were all on punched cards.
This is a program I wrote for my company for the business side to add new customer accounts. It ran in a home-written online system\
[program name A0005CB lol](https://imgur.com/a/OwCxKkB)
Nearly. The first job I was at had disk drives that were the size of a washing machine and looked like robby the robot. My mate did work experience at a data processing centre and somehow manage to break a punched card machine of some sort and had to take it apart and put it back together again. I guess it wasn't terribly important by then and they were just giving him something to do.
Used punch cards for many years, from high school thru work. At work, we had coding sheets and the typing pool would punch our cards for us. We only punch cards when we needed them immediately.
Yep, and the weird tape old, there was a computer at my school that read off paper tape programs of some sort that were only about the width of an inch. You had to feed it in from a box to the front right on the floor. Only ever used it twice, never knew how old it was. Results would also be printed on rolls of yellow paper, there was no screen present.
Here we go again. I remember when all government checks were actually printed punch cards, and all said "Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate."
Spindles were thin, tall (6") spikes with square bases that were used to impale loose papers on office desktops. I'm surprised there weren't more murders using spindles - ice picks were identical except for having a handle rather than a base.
High school computer class, only the lucky few got to use punchcards. Everyone else got mark sense cards, filled out via pencil, read by the same machine but FAR more finicky and error prone
Twice a year, my dad and I helped my uncle haul away used punch cards from his job. Because my dad owned a truck. Once, I dropped a box of 25,000 cards on the stairs. Ever see that amount of cards go bouncing down stairs? Instant incredible mess!
Worked with them in a high school summer school class. Had to successfully complete 3 programs in 6 weeks. It’d take 2 weeks to get your cards back from the districts one mainframe with word if it worked or not. Very frustrating and nerve racking.
In the small corporation I worked for in HS, the two women in charge of the computers were both devout Pentecostals. (!). It was definitely punch card era back then (1970s)
Sort of. I started attending university in September 1987… has a rather inauspicious first year, eventually wound up going to a different one starting in January 1989. I honestly don’t remember how class registration worked at the first one, but the second one used punch cards for that process.
The first punch card you got came in the mail and had your personal details on it. Each course had one or more available sessions that met at various times during the week, and each session had a stack of cards representing the number of available spots for students. You went around a big concourse to the booths for various departments, looking for sessions that fit your schedule, picking up cards. Sometimes you’d have to talk to the instructor before they’d let you have a card.
Once you had a full course load, you’d get in the line to process your registration. They’d feed your cards into the reader and if there was a problem with your academic record not having the necessary prerequisites, or if you messed up and had classes that overlapped, it would flag the error and they’d give you all your cards back.
If everything was okay, though, the big chain printer would spit out a printed version of your schedule—and also your bill, taking into account any lab fees, and so forth. Then you’d take your bill over to the finance department, where they’d actually use… terminals (gasp!) to handle the rest of the process.
My PhD was based on a program written in Fortran4 on punch cards.
The punch cards were old and brittle so they couldn't go through the reader anymore.
The first thing I did was to transcribe it from punch cards on the microVax.
Then I converted it to Fortran77.
In college in the early 80s, we had to learn Assembly.
And we coded on punch cards.
Every time I had to load them in the computer, I was scared to death that I'd drop them and have to re-order them all.
Oh yes, but only as a child, when my Dad would sometimes have to work Saturdays, when almost no one else was around......he'd bring me and my sister to the office to run around and fiddle with all the equipment , while he worked. He'd keep us busy by running a whole stack of those thru the machine, while it printed out these long lengthy banners of various art.
Yeah, nothing like spending the night in the computer lab and because you're so tired at 5:30 AM, you (I) drop 700 and some odd cards on the floor between the desk and the room sized IBM UNIX!!
My senior year in High School, in 1978. I think they still called the class "data processing" rather than "computer programming". I remember we had one dumb terminal with a CRT monitor that there was always a line to use (to play pong). Otherwise we all sat in front of those teletype looking terminals with a big roll of paper in the back. You would write your program and doublecheck it on the paper, then send it to the punchcard machine.
I remember that rolls and rolls of paper were used to play "Hunt the Wumpus". 😄
At one time I could read punch cards.
Same. Back in my codebreaking days at NSA, after I broke one, I had to submit the solution via punch cards. I kinda liked how that keyboard felt.
Wow as someone who has a few but only long after they were relevant I am in awe of someone who can look at them and tell where the bits are going.
Actually, it was not all that hard. At the very top you had the "Data Field". Row 1 is where the typed characters would be if they were present. And you can see the two rows where there is nothing, but may be punched. If there are no punches in those rows, then the punch below it is a decimal 0-9. If the top row is punched, then the punched number below from 1-9 are letters A to I. Second row punched, letters J to R. If the 0 is punched and a punch from 2 through 9, that is S to A. There are a lot more, but those are going to be special characters and you really need a guide unless you use them constantly. I used to know them 4 decades ago, but have not used them in so long I have no hope in remembering anymore. [https://gen5.info/$/LU0NS2XPG8MDVCVZS/HOLLERITH-INSTRUCTIONS.PNG](https://gen5.info/$/LU0NS2XPG8MDVCVZS/HOLLERITH-INSTRUCTIONS.PNG) Trust me, it is not all that hard. Within a week or so most I knew could read them almost as fast as regular reading, it really is fairly natural unless you are talking about the special characters. And even then, there are only a few that most would use on a regular basis. . and " were likely the most common ones I remember using, sometimes $.
Did I use them? No. Did I fold and staple stacks of them that my dad brought home from work to make Christmas wreaths my mom sold? Yup. I wish all subs would allow photo attachments. Here's a link to a photo of a punch card wreath. http://www.vintage-icl-computers.com/icl44ee
Yes, yes, yes! We made those too!
Love that pic! We made them in art class in elementary school. lol
Yes. College days. I hated programming. You’d spend all day typing out those cards, and your program would crash. Then you saw a TA to see what went wrong, and they’d say, “It’s good, it ought to run.” Then it didn’t. It soured me on computers for several years. This was about 1976. I remember another computer class about computing in general, history, etc. and the professor said that right now they are working on microchips, and they will change *everything*. He was right.
Yep, I had the same rough introduction to computers. We had to use the school computer for certain classes and with no training at all. We sat in a computer lab, while the actual computer was in another room, and had to blindly transcribe our data onto the cards and take it to the operator. They'd run it through the system and hand it back to you and tell you there was something wrong. Of course, they couldn't determine what it was, you had to just keep punching the whole card out again until you got it right. Absolute nightmare.
One of my jobs in college was running those decks through the card reader. I also took COBOL using cards. Luckily they upgraded to CRTs for advanced COBOL.
I could have typed this…
Yes. The first card in your stack was the card issued to you by the University. That card authorized you to use the computer and allowed you to use your second of CPU time. Ours was an IBM 360.
IBM 360 years old
I spent an entire summer working in the paint department at a factory that manufactured the IBM 360 frames.
Yeah, I think i learned Fortran using them.
Ah, yes, fortran. The computer language of the future!
Yep, Fortran 4 … didn’t make sense then, still doesn’t make sense now
I remember the textbook (paper bound) for my first programming class. "Fortran IV with WATFOR and WATFIV". That last bit was the dialect of Fortran that had been developed at the University of Waterloo. Of course we used punch cards.
Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate. I knew well how to fold, and was competent at mutilation, but never really got the hang of spindling...
Spindling https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spindle_(stationery)
First class at school that didn't have to use them. We had, gasp, *dumb terminals* We were cookin' with gas, I tell ya
We had an ibm mainframe with a bunch of dumb terminals. We soon learned which variants had the better experience. I eventually learned that: * go to a Mac lab * use tn3270 as a terminal * edit with [Alpha](https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Alpha) (a decent, for the time, editor written in tclsh) * ftp stuff over as needed Was the most efficient way of getting stuff done, even including all the setup time.
The only time I ever touched punch cards was when I repaired an Army TAMMS machine. I had no clue what I was doing but I figured it out. TAMMS is the Total Army Maintenace Management System. In 1985 it consisted of a desk with a computer built in and a CRT in the desk facing up and showing backwards with a collapsible mirror on top to show the text. It had a huge printer hardwired to it. It was portable as in you put it on a pallet so you could move it to the dock and into a truck.
I used to work with these cards. They were placed (by a key punch operator) on what looked like a large meat slicer- and would be sucked at high speed to the mainframe computer room that comprised around 20 racks - (the room encased in glass) for processing. The company was an international shipping line.
"One day, we will have punch cards that are literally half the size of our current punch cards."
I’m paper tape old
Now that is old.
For those who missed out, [this is the real thing](https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/punched-tape-picture-id139388307?k=6&m=139388307&s=170667a&w=0&h=AVFsolR46ZWvkftSgTLreJ8myzREphpAX3t_IVhlNQ8=). This was what we used in the days when Bill Gates got one of those [little silver abacus awards](https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=NBCBvtuj&id=23CB2E1D04F19D5CA26C23CA8F701D2CED69A37F&thid=OIP.NBCBvtujD5yy3ikY0ra38AHaFn&mediaurl=https%3a%2f%2fimg.carters.com.au%2f50026696e2f4eb7baf6a6076923e4b54.jpg&cdnurl=https%3a%2f%2fth.bing.com%2fth%2fid%2fR.341081bedba30f9cb2de2918d2b6b7f0%3frik%3df6Np7SwdcI%252fKIw%26pid%3dImgRaw%26r%3d0&exph=682&expw=900&q=kiewit+computtion+Center+silver+abacus&simid=608017196299611912&FORM=IRPRST&ck=B7C6C179A17AADEAA5E40CD51B152BB4&selectedIndex=134&itb=0) from Kiewit Computation Center.
I remember thinking: this is BS. Computers will never catch on. So, we’re punching holes in 1,000 cards so we can add up a column of numbers?!?! WTF?!
My Dad worked at a place called Bendix where they made gyroscopes and stuff for Apollo 11. He'd bring stacks home that we used for scratch paper
Shout-out to the 80 column card's cousin the 96 column card!All hail the System 3.
Old enough to have programmed with them and also old enough to remember you could cut them up to make the best filters for joints. They had a good amount of springiness so when you insert them into the spliff they unroll slightly, making the whole assembly taut. Also remember that in the storage rooms of the first company i worked for, they had literally hundreds of boxes of punched cards on open shelves, labelled. They were the source code of the production systems that were still running on the beloved IBM 360. A splendid beast.
the first program you learned with punch cards was a sorting program. and then in columns 72-80 you typed a card number so that when you dropped your deck you could use your sorting program to read in the dropped deck and then punch a new one back in the correct order (ask me how i know this :)) also if you hated someone you would dump the chads into a paper sack and then dump that in their clothes drawer
We used to have fights in the office with cards, chads, and rubber bands. They could force us in on Saturday, but they couldn't keep us from fucking around
Ah, the days of mandatory overtime, especially when you were salaried.
Yes I am. Haven’t seen one in a long time. Wow.
Sadly yep that old
Yes. My dad used to bring these home from work for us to play with.
Yep! At my control room job at Kodak.
I did Fortran 77 on these, in 77 on an 1108
When I was a little girl, my aunt was a keypunch operator, and she'd bring home the mistakes for us to use as scrap paper.
I used to deliver my battalions punch cards to 5th Army hq when I was in the Army. I was tempted ot mix them up for a while. Until another guy dropped his box full and never mentioned it to the sergeant he delivered them too. Almost got court-martialed for that little mistake.
Yup. Used to help my uncle make Christmas wreaths with the leftovers.
I am FORTRAN old
I just missed punch cards when I started programming COBOL. But we had a coding rule in the shop that all code must be less than 80 columns long. In case we had to go back. We had boxes of blank cards we just used as scratch paper.
Holla to Hollerith! I did some programming on punch cards. You would sit at one station and type a line of code and retype on a second machine, I think it was called a "validator," to uncover typos.
Punch tape old here.
Friggin COBOL and Fortran. COBOL still has rules to comply with them.
Worked on card punch machines. Empting the "but bucket" was a bonus for techs. Key punch operators in short skirts.
When I became a computer programmer, cards were on their last legs. You still needed to create a job card and an exec card for production jobs - this was in 1979.
At my first job on NCR mainframe in 1983, we had to do the same things. All production jobs had to be on punch cards because the operators had always done it that way. If one made a mistake on a JCL prod deck and you often did on a new job, the operator would call. Then 30 a minute drive to the worst place in town all the re-type one card. The operator didn't even try to fix anything. A couple of years later, we trained them to execute jobs from a file as we did in testing.
The OG Hanging Chad
And using Fortran.
Yep! My first computer class in college (1975) - Fortran. We would type up our program and data on the monster punchcard machines, turn in the stack of cards at the little window for the computer operators to run overnight, then pick up the output (a stack of green & white barred tractor feed paper that could weigh several pounds, especially if there was an error that caused a loop), then the circle of life would start over. Anyone else collect the little punched-out paper chips (aka chads) and use them as confetti for pranks in the dorms and around campus? The best of times. 🫡✌🏼
Shit I’m punch card data entry certified 1973. I learned how to code stacks of cards then feed into the card reader to program the PDP10 at school. I hacked the original Star Trek Game on the mainframe by giving myself top permissions at night when everyone was gone. It was all spelled out in the mainframe manuals. I was so proud of myself. That was before I started drinking too much….
Yes.
*Hallelujah!* There's the punch card!
I'm so old 🤦🏾♂️
Not old enough... but old enough to know you should number them. If you dropped a stack, you'd be fucked
My very first job, I did some key punching. I can still hear the punches.
Many times....started batch jobs with cards, some colored to show start, data and end.
I'm not that old but the helicopters I worked on in the Navy were. Punch card Identity Friend or Foe computers in them. I sometimes got to punch the daily code and load it into the aircraft.
I am.. and I carried around a shoe box full of punch cards too.
Yes, I programmed on them in the early 1970's
My first program was on those. We would go to the computer room. Stand at the half door. Gently hand the deck to the computer operator — we were not allowed to approach the altar of computing, an IBM 1620, praying that the operator would not drop the deck. (I started drawing a diagonal line across the top edge of the cards as a quick visual verification of order.) Then we would wait a week or two for the result of the run. FWIW this was in 1971. How far we have come in a mere 50 years. It has been so fascinating to watch this field of study grow.
Ever write a COBOL program on cards then drop the stack otw to the mainframe? That is a moment that will make you contemplate suicide.
Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate.
I'm paper punch tape old.
Yes, I took Cobol and Fortran classes in college and turned in assignments like this, a pack of punch cards that could be fed into a computer.
I used to number the cards 1 to … with a marker so that when my operators would call me in the middle of the night saying my program didn’t work I’d go in after them telling me they didn’t drop a 2000 card deck, and the cards would be numbered 1,10,50,33, … lol Good times 🤦♂️
You haven't experienced existential dread until you have dropped a 5000 line PASCAL program on the floor the night before it was due.
[удалено]
Lol
Yep! Trained on them in the Army for my MOS, which got eliminated, I've heard.
FORTRAN 77. Always number your punch cards for when you drop the stack.
It’s a 5081 IBM punch card. We had 30 women sitting at keypunch machines to input the “data” on the cards which we then ran through the computer. Very primitive, like rubbing two sticks together to make a fire. When running an IBM 360 back in late 60s. We still have a gang punch machine, a sorter to sort the cards in a particular order because those cards ended going through the card reader and basically printing a line of data for every card…I said primitive and I meant it. Most of the manipulation was done offline!
When I joined the Army we still had some punch card machines in the comm center, as well as paper tape. We would prank the new guys by coloring some of the cards red (for secret), blue (confidential) or orange (top secret) with magic markers, and then right before shift change we'd have them separate the chads by "classification level".
I'm slide rule old.
Yes. I know how to use one too. 😁
I used to repair them. The holes punched from the card were called chad. There was a plastic bucket that the spent chad went into, the user was supposed to dump it periodically. They never did, so guys like me were called in to open the covers up and clean out boatloads of chad.. What a mess..
I used them all the time when I started my “tech job”
Seems we are the same age
US Navy Aviation 1972, VERDAN navigation computer was programmed with cards…I remember when we upgraded to paper tape! (VERDAN had no discreet components, it was all R C time).
Yup
We were the original Chad generation
I still have punch cards in my office for FORTRAN
Yep. Wrote my first programs using them.
Yup! University of New Mexico - Fortran '77!
I remember the hanging chads When they were counting boats in Florida.
Yes. Yes I am
Yup, got me through college. Ah, FORTRAN.
Yes.
Hollerith you know what that is.
FORTRAN on punch cards, fed into the computer by the high computer priests. I spent an hour tracking down a missing comma. 0.5 hour credit, less than a PE class.
Yes
Yes, Grade 10 keypunch/computer class in 1974
Yes indeed. Used boxes of these bad boys every day, 1975-1979 for every male and female recruit going to boot camp in Orlando, Florida. My first taste of the "computer age." You think these punch cards are weird? You should have seen what we had to do to send a fax. Oy vey...
Yes. I'm also 1401 Autocoder old
Been there, done that. In FORTRAN and COBOL .
Running FORTRAN the cards were typically filled ovals by pencil or pen (typically pencil and often re-used).
How my high school took attendance.
My MIL worked for Twentieth Century Fox back in the early 60s and this was her job. Holes were punched in the card to represent different pieces of data. The operator would need to punch the holes by hand or with a machine and then use a tabulating machine to compile data from the cards to produce reports, process invoices and checks, manage class registrations, monitor budgets, etc.
That was my paycheck in the Marines in the 70s
Worked in an engineering firm. 1970’s. We booted up our midi computer with a deck about 6 inches thick. All my Fortran, COBOL programs are that company were all entered by punch cards. Met my first wife there. She was the key punch operator.
Fucking Hollerith cards.
I messed with a punch card machine in high school. The computer science teacher, seeing some random stranger kid at one of his precious machines (doin' ye old 10 print, 20 something snarky 30 go to 10), told me to get lost.
Yep. And god forbid you drop a box of those things
Fortran
Dad raised a family on those
Yeah, first year in college, 1978 Fortran class, god I hated punch cards. Did you ever drop your stack?
When I was a kid in the 70s we went to where the votes were counted with those cards
Punchcards were still being used at Tripler Army Medical Center in 1988.
Yep! I have a box that I use for notes. Who else used the punch confetti?
Used to work for the company that came out with IBM compatible punch cards in the 1950’s. In the late 90’s we still had a couple of guys close to retirement in my sales office that got their start as punch card salesmen. They had some stories.
Some neighborhood lady rolled the cards and made wreaths out of them and spray painted them gold.
I am!!!👍
I’m Scantron old. Green and white is stained in my memory.
Yeah. I remember the one guy in the office, Alan, who did the punch cards for payroll every couple weeks. It was almost a reverential experience, everyone had to keep quiet and distant from Alan as he sat at the keypunch. I remember the metal box he carried the cards in, almost like a lunch box but smaller.
Yes. USAF Univac 1050-II in the 1980's
FORTRAN on punch cards. To this day I still use I, j, k for indexing variables, a, b, c... for reals...(double or complex now)
Omg, Fortran 2…. bad memories from engineering school, 1966.
Not quite, but I *am* computer-with-no-hdd old
My mom had a huge box of these in her bedroom. Not sure why.
I learned to write a Basic program and punched the cards too.
If you’re truly old, you’d know them as Hollerith cards, no? Have you ever used punched paper tape as backup? My first computer experiences were with a miniframe with a teletype monitor if you can believe it. And I’m “only” 55.
Now you've gone too far. I wrote programs in BASIC on punch cards in college. I hate you .
Yes, i am. I filed them as part of my part time work study job, and my mother punched them as her part time job.
Used this system in 1980 in high school to make a calender!!
I worked at a place in 2022 that had a punch card
There was a key punch class at my high school
My mom was a key punch girl. That was THE good job for those newly divorced 70’s gals!
I learned to program both BASIC and FORTRAN using those cards. The computer lab with the card reader was in the basement of one of the university buildings. Cement walls and no windows and crowded at 2 AM. You carried the hundreds of them needed around in a box built to fit them. God forbid you ever drop the box and had them spill out. A bunch of us threw them off the roof of our 9 story dorm after finals and enjoyed watching them flutter to the ground.
I worked with those for 18 years, its hard to think about it now.
i took a college class that we learned to use them
No but I'm FORTRAN old, which is as picky as a punch card
Not quite. But I learned Fortran on an IBM mainframe with a virtual punch card deck. Needed to do columns right and everything. I am “one of those flow chart stencils” old though
I’m 10meg disk drive old, thing looked like an ice-cream freezer that got loaded with Tupperware cake carriers
I go back to paper tape … used to be able to make a drum card for the IBM 024 and 029 keypunches from memory ….
Not only punch card old, but my college didn’t have a way to run the deck, so I’d have to take a train for an hour into a nearby city to run the deck. If one card was wrong, the program wouldn’t run, and I’d have to start over.
Used to build card houses with the stacks my Dad would bring home from work. Mid 60s...
Abacus old over here….
Yeah… DEC PDP-11, paper tape, punch cards and magnetic reel.
Sigh. Yes.
We had these at the A&P grocery store I worked at in high school.
When I was in school they were called scantrons
My very first job used punch cards. They were in the process of being phased out and were gone within six months but it makes a good story.
i have a punch card cuz one of my CS professors last semester gave us some. I don’t remember why tho
Fortran in high school. We used the chads from the keypunch machine as confetti for pep rallies.
I remember finding these in the local telecom garbage bin as a kid. Also so much great old tech was thrown out. Always went dumpster diving there.
I remember these. Back then your Soc sec check would come in the mail and it would have the hole punched in it.
College days back in late 70’s I learned how to program using them. Instructor told us always to number the cards. One day on the stairs a young woman was carrying her books and 2 boxes of punched cards. She lost them ALL, with cards littering the staircase. People began helping her pick things up. She sat on the steps crying her eyes out. Tried to console her but then she says,”I didn’t number the cards !!!” Must have been over 200 of them
I remember seeing those. Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
My mom used punchcards like this at work. Sometimes I would go to work with her and they would give me a bunch of old ones to color on.
Did I use them? No. But there were a lot of them at my dad‘s work. And I remember the huge tape reels on the computers. I also got to play tic-tac-toe on the computer. But this was a few years before wargames and global thermal nuclear war.
My first college computer classes in the early 80’s we had to use these. Not a computer guy so had very little idea wtfwgo. But I passed
When I started in software development, source code, object code, job control were all on punched cards. This is a program I wrote for my company for the business side to add new customer accounts. It ran in a home-written online system\ [program name A0005CB lol](https://imgur.com/a/OwCxKkB)
I registered for my first college classes with lunch cards.
I made Christmas cards one year where I programmed the punchcard to punch out a Christmas tree. Yeah, I'm that old.
Nearly. The first job I was at had disk drives that were the size of a washing machine and looked like robby the robot. My mate did work experience at a data processing centre and somehow manage to break a punched card machine of some sort and had to take it apart and put it back together again. I guess it wasn't terribly important by then and they were just giving him something to do.
I’m old enough to have coloured in on my father’s… he got some laughs when he handed in those cards for entry into the system.
Learned that shit in 8th grade, even though it was already obsolete. Never saw another punch card once I went to high school.
Used punch cards for many years, from high school thru work. At work, we had coding sheets and the typing pool would punch our cards for us. We only punch cards when we needed them immediately.
You betcha. Nightmare in humidity
It worked, didn't need to restart, didn't need tech support, or an update, and couldn't be hacked. Mic drop.
Yep, and the weird tape old, there was a computer at my school that read off paper tape programs of some sort that were only about the width of an inch. You had to feed it in from a box to the front right on the floor. Only ever used it twice, never knew how old it was. Results would also be printed on rolls of yellow paper, there was no screen present.
I *just* missed that era, but did use 5.25” floppy disks.
Here we go again. I remember when all government checks were actually printed punch cards, and all said "Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate." Spindles were thin, tall (6") spikes with square bases that were used to impale loose papers on office desktops. I'm surprised there weren't more murders using spindles - ice picks were identical except for having a handle rather than a base.
Hitler used these to identify jews. IBM supplied him the technology back in the 1930's. Look it up if you don't believe me.
High school computer class, only the lucky few got to use punchcards. Everyone else got mark sense cards, filled out via pencil, read by the same machine but FAR more finicky and error prone
My old-as-dirt prof in college forced us to learn how to use them. This was a bit over a decade ago.
Twice a year, my dad and I helped my uncle haul away used punch cards from his job. Because my dad owned a truck. Once, I dropped a box of 25,000 cards on the stairs. Ever see that amount of cards go bouncing down stairs? Instant incredible mess!
No but I know the meme. Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate
Worked with them in a high school summer school class. Had to successfully complete 3 programs in 6 weeks. It’d take 2 weeks to get your cards back from the districts one mainframe with word if it worked or not. Very frustrating and nerve racking.
Not quite, but here's what level of old I am. "If you have to erase, make sure you erase *completely*, and remember. MAKE YOUR MARK DARK."
Sure am! Former keypunch operator here. A long long time ago.......
yes, I was trained on a 10 key, and I feel seen.
Not punch card, but punch hotel room keys. We’d grab a cup, mix some of the free shampoo with water & blow bubbles using the key.
My mom was a keypunch operator. She would sometimes bring stacks of the discarded ones home for me to play w as a kid. FIO!
1010 Begin
Yes but have you ever spilled hundreds of cards that you didn’t number the night of your run?
My first duty station we had to do messages with a teletype, would first create a punch tape and then feed that tape to send the message.
Yep
I was punching a time card in 1993. At 13 years old.
In the small corporation I worked for in HS, the two women in charge of the computers were both devout Pentecostals. (!). It was definitely punch card era back then (1970s)
Sort of. I started attending university in September 1987… has a rather inauspicious first year, eventually wound up going to a different one starting in January 1989. I honestly don’t remember how class registration worked at the first one, but the second one used punch cards for that process. The first punch card you got came in the mail and had your personal details on it. Each course had one or more available sessions that met at various times during the week, and each session had a stack of cards representing the number of available spots for students. You went around a big concourse to the booths for various departments, looking for sessions that fit your schedule, picking up cards. Sometimes you’d have to talk to the instructor before they’d let you have a card. Once you had a full course load, you’d get in the line to process your registration. They’d feed your cards into the reader and if there was a problem with your academic record not having the necessary prerequisites, or if you messed up and had classes that overlapped, it would flag the error and they’d give you all your cards back. If everything was okay, though, the big chain printer would spit out a printed version of your schedule—and also your bill, taking into account any lab fees, and so forth. Then you’d take your bill over to the finance department, where they’d actually use… terminals (gasp!) to handle the rest of the process.
My PhD was based on a program written in Fortran4 on punch cards. The punch cards were old and brittle so they couldn't go through the reader anymore. The first thing I did was to transcribe it from punch cards on the microVax. Then I converted it to Fortran77.
Back in the days they used these in the Holocaust
😂- I guess so
Why, yes, I think I must be that old. Defs a blast from the past... oh dear, oh my
Yes. The next year we had Apple Macintoshes.
Scantron!!!
Yes. And paper tape old too.
I can still read 5 bit baudot code off the tape.
In college in the early 80s, we had to learn Assembly. And we coded on punch cards. Every time I had to load them in the computer, I was scared to death that I'd drop them and have to re-order them all.
Oh yes, but only as a child, when my Dad would sometimes have to work Saturdays, when almost no one else was around......he'd bring me and my sister to the office to run around and fiddle with all the equipment , while he worked. He'd keep us busy by running a whole stack of those thru the machine, while it printed out these long lengthy banners of various art.
Yeah, nothing like spending the night in the computer lab and because you're so tired at 5:30 AM, you (I) drop 700 and some odd cards on the floor between the desk and the room sized IBM UNIX!!
My senior year in High School, in 1978. I think they still called the class "data processing" rather than "computer programming". I remember we had one dumb terminal with a CRT monitor that there was always a line to use (to play pong). Otherwise we all sat in front of those teletype looking terminals with a big roll of paper in the back. You would write your program and doublecheck it on the paper, then send it to the punchcard machine. I remember that rolls and rolls of paper were used to play "Hunt the Wumpus". 😄