On Wed, 28 Oct 2009, William Donzelli wrote:
? Deep in the
mountains of West Virginia is a vast underground storage
facility filled with Hollerith cards... ?:-)
In the early 1990s it was still quite reasonable to find a card reader
and punch (typically an IBM 3505/3525 pair) in a good sized mainframe
shop. 20 years after they stopped using punch cards. Just in case.
I started working on a Honeywell Mainframe in late 1990, the month before I
got there they had gotten rid of the card reader, but up to that point, it
was used to bootstrap the system. In fact I think that card deck was still
there when I left at the end of '93.
Zane