11 Oct
2005
11 Oct
'05
10:50 p.m.
> > In 1957 they could not punch out the 2,000
binary cards of FORTRAN II
> > and had to go tape instead.
> > Now that is about 72*12 bits per card ... you work out the math.
>"could not punch out 2,000 binary
cards"????
>I've punched many decks much larger than that.
>(DP of Office of Civil Rights, Space Sciences Data Center at GSFC)
On Tue, 11 Oct 2005, woodelf wrote:
Well you can read it yourself.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/mmdd/SiliconValley/Backus/backus.html
Thank you for the reference
It doesn't really say that they "could not" punch over 2,000 cards;
it says that THEY were having a lot of errors, and WANTED a
faster, more reliable method. In fact, it explicitly says that they
DID punch and distribute some decks.
Ten years later, when I was doing EAM and punched card data processing
with 360s with FORTRAN IV, WATFOR, and even PDQ FORTRAN on 1620, the
punches were quite a bit more reliable. and multi-box decks were not
uncommon.