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Bit rot, in one form or another, has been causing trouble since we started doing this computer thing. I have nightmares about my thoughts being stored on a pun

• PhantomGremlin 11y ago
  my thoughts being stored on a punchcard but having no punchcard readers to read my own thoughts A single punched card?[1] That's only 80 chars, very low density, not much room for any nuance in any given thought. As to information retrieval, punched cards are very easily decoded by hand, without a reader. I used punched cards IRL as a student, and I had to decode occasionally when there was a problem with the printing on the card. Not a big deal. The real "nightmares" came about when you punched a program, trudged down to the computer center, read it in, and then waited anywhere between 5 minutes and 24 hours before the computer operator took a bunch of output from the line printer, separated the individual jobs, and placed the output in racks for you to retrieve. And then you found out you had a syntax error. One plus side was that, since this took so much time, you learned to take a little care in writing your program and in checking it for typos before submitting it. That sort of discipline turns out to be quite useful in many activities in later life. On another plus side, the cards were made of relatively thick paper, and there was only printing on one side. So the flip side of an unpunched card was absolutely great for writing little notes. Those, sadly, are just about the only "plus sides" I can think of for punched cards. Fortunately I've never ever had any nightmares about those days. :) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card