3 ms·

And "tty" = "teletype terminal". We use "glass ttys", which emulate the older mechanical ones. My favorite old term, which is still used at times, is 'false dr

by dalke 11y ago

And "tty" = "teletype terminal". We use "glass ttys", which emulate the older mechanical ones. My favorite old term, which is still used at times, is 'false drop'. (Eg, see http://www.researchinformation.info/features/feature.php?feature_id=528 http://www.researchinformation.info/features/feature.php?fea... .) The term comes from the days of manual punched cards, using edge-notched cards, where you would stick a needle through a given position deck of cards and lift. The cards with the notch at that position would fall out. Those with a hole would stay. Hence, the cards you want "fall out". But if you used multi-punch encoding (eg, encode two rare terms to a single location) in order to decrease the number of holes required, then you might get some "false drops". Nowadays we mostly say 'false positives' for this case.

gh02t 11y ago
I once heard one of the guys from Cray give a presentation where he told a story about playing a prank on one of the Army research guys. He said it was right after they had installed a shiny new (washing machine sized) hard drive. They had already duplicated his (many thousands of punch cards long) program onto the drive. They had a glass room overlooking the actual computer room where you'd go after handing one of the techs your cards to be entered. They brought the guy up there and he was waiting after handing off his cards and they had pre-arranged with the technician to trip and dump the cards everywhere. He said the Army guy turned white as a sheet of paper and looked like he was going to cry (this would have necessitated many hours putting the cards back in order). Then he told the guy that it was fine and they already had a copy loaded in on the drive.
- dalke 11y ago
  Cruel! The usual solution was to take a marker and swipe the deck along the top side, in a diagonal, so they are much easier to sort. You might recall that Fortran ignored everything beyond column 72. This was where you put the 'sequence number', aka line number, so when you drop the deck you stick the cards the sorting machine and voila, it's ordered again. Ahh, I see Wikipedia covers this bit of arcana, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_programming_in_the_punched_card_era#Columns_73-80 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_programming_in_the_pu... . But there are many stories of the heartbreak of those who didn't take one of these precautions. Ha! In looking for one I came across http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/sorter.html http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/sorter.html : > You may have heard the story of the operator who dropped a whole box of cards. Wanting to put things right as quickly as possible, he sorted the cards, without consulting the user. As it turned out, that was the worst possible response. Up until that point, the box had contained a sample of random numbers. –Ted Powell, Dec 2006

by dalke 11y ago

gh02t 11y ago

I once heard one of the guys from Cray give a presentation where he told a story about playing a prank on one of the Army research guys. He said it was right after they had installed a shiny new (washing machine sized) hard drive. They had already duplicated his (many thousands of punch cards long) program onto the drive. They had a glass room overlooking the actual computer room where you'd go after handing one of the techs your cards to be entered. They brought the guy up there and he was waiting after handing off his cards and they had pre-arranged with the technician to trip and dump the cards everywhere. He said the Army guy turned white as a sheet of paper and looked like he was going to cry (this would have necessitated many hours putting the cards back in order). Then he told the guy that it was fine and they already had a copy loaded in on the drive.

dalke 11y ago
Cruel! The usual solution was to take a marker and swipe the deck along the top side, in a diagonal, so they are much easier to sort. You might recall that Fortran ignored everything beyond column 72. This was where you put the 'sequence number', aka line number, so when you drop the deck you stick the cards the sorting machine and voila, it's ordered again. Ahh, I see Wikipedia covers this bit of arcana, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_programming_in_the_punched_card_era#Columns_73-80 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_programming_in_the_pu... . But there are many stories of the heartbreak of those who didn't take one of these precautions. Ha! In looking for one I came across http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/sorter.html http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/sorter.html : > You may have heard the story of the operator who dropped a whole box of cards. Wanting to put things right as quickly as possible, he sorted the cards, without consulting the user. As it turned out, that was the worst possible response. Up until that point, the box had contained a sample of random numbers. –Ted Powell, Dec 2006