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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 af

by 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 gh02t 11y ago

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