10 May
2015
10 May
'15
12:06 p.m.
On 2015-05-10 20:52, William Donzelli wrote:
I don't know how common card readers were, but I don't think any DEC
machines could punch cards. You normally had free standing terminals on
which cards were punched, and then the cards were read in later.
RSX have three types of queues, printers, batch, and card spoolers. Card
spoolers were purely for punched cards, so there obviously was at some
point a far amount of those around for describing jobs to be performed.
I was contacted by someone (I can't remember who right now) not so long
ago, about how the input card queues worked, since he couldn't get it to
work on the latest version of RSX. And it turns out that that software
have bit rotted. Other parts of RSX have been updated and changed to the
point where the batch input card queue no longer works properly. I guess
noone have tested that one in a long time. I don't remember exactly what
the problem was, but I think it was either that the format of messages
for the batch manager itself have changed (happened in 1993, when there
was an year wrap issue coming up), or else something about named
directories.
Johnny
Indeed, but I
think that even in that application card readers were not all that common. The batch card
model was more an IBM thing, with DEC systems tending more to terminal input.
Yes, but PDP-11s were right in that sweet spot in the business
environment. Plenty of businesses had all their records on cards, even
if they had service bureaus do all the processing, and DEC wanted to
grab part of the end of the punch card era of thinking.
One has to wonder if that very specific strategy did not work as
planned, as we rarely see any actual PDP-11s with card machines.
Perhaps the service bureaus themselves did the media conversion, and
DEC then moved in after that cards were gone. The support for handling
cards still stuck around for the stragglers.