22 Jun
2016
22 Jun
'16
6:14 p.m.
From: Chuck Guzis
Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2016 5:13 PM
On 06/22/2016 04:46 PM, Rich Alderson wrote:
> And it's rarely an armload. Most programs fit
into a deck of a few dozen
> cards or so. If you can't wrap a rubber band around the deck, you kept it
> in the box. (Oh, yeah, you bought cards in boxes of 2000. About 16" long,
> IIRC.)
Well, if you were a serious programmer, major segments
of code came in
the drawer of a card filing cabinet (I don't recall exactly, but I
believe one held about two boxes.) However, then the idea was to get
them onto tape before something dreadful happened, such as being
subjected to a jam or being rejected because of a compare error in the
reader.
Well, sure, but I was answering Swift's student-sounding question. A card
drawer held slightly more than 2.5 boxes' worth of cards, but you wouldn't
carry that around, of course.
I can recall on more than one occasion where an I/O
clerk with a cart
loaded down with card trays hit a loose trim strip in a raised floor.
Mayhem indeed. If you were smart, you drew a long diagonal across the
top of the card deck with a felt-tip pen to at least give you some sort
of clue about the order.
Different colors, different patterns, anything to help.
For that matter, cards were manufactured with different colors along the
upper edge (where the printing went in a keypunch) to allow for this kind
of separation. That predates electronic computers, I would wager.
There were SCCS type of systems even back then.
SCOPE had UPDATE,
which corresponded to KRONOS MODIFY. Each card was assigned a set
identifier and sequence number, used as reference when editing. Updates
could be YANKed or PURGEd as necessary.
Oh, yes. We had that kind of thing on big IBM gear as well.
Rich
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/