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A few stories behind the pictures: - The programmer is probably playing guitar because he is waiting for his compile. It had to be batched and returned, somet
by edw519 16y ago
A few stories behind the pictures:
- The programmer is probably playing guitar because he is waiting for his compile. It had to be batched and returned, sometimes hours later. Imagine getting things done with only one compile per day.
- The programmer is giving an obscene gesture to the terminal because he forgot a semicolon (more likely a period in his COBOL program) and will now have to wait another day for a clean compile. Move that deadline back to October.
- The terminal the programmer is giving an obscene gesture to is a state-of-the-art Datawriter, a PAPER-DRIVEN terminal. A moment of silence is needed for all the trees sacrificed for our future.
- The programmer was special because he had access to the Datawriter, which was probably in the computer room. Anyone else, including all users, had to use pencil and special forms (like taking their SATs) to enter data into the IBM Mainframe. Those forms went to the Data Control Unit where teams of mostly women keypunched the data onto 80 column cards which were fed into a hopper. The early keypunch machines put the holes in the cards as you typed, so that if you made a mistake, you had to start over with a new card. Later, these machines had memory, so you could finish the virtual card, and hit a key that did the whole card. Probably saved a lot of paper.
- Notice all the coats hanging in the break room. It may have been winter, but just as likely, they were needed in the computer room. It was cold in there!
- Note that the "Data Terminal" pictures are at the bottom of the page in the mini-computer section. This was a big deal back then. Mini-computers got CRT displays before IBM mainframes. That's how they competed with Big Blue. For programmers, this was as big an advance as we would ever get. Imagine building that web app today, buying cases of cards from Office Depot and getting one compile per day.
- The Demonstration Center was a big deal, too. Several places I worked had the computer room behind glass in the lobby. Companies wanted their customers to physically see how advanced their technology was.
Thanks for the memories. Now burn those pictures.
- HeyLaughingBoy 16y agoI'm old enough that my Mom was a keypunch operator and would bring me home bags of "square confetti" from the chads punched out of cards and also discarded keypunch cards to play with. I may not have written my first program until I was 16-17, but I read my first IBM manuals around age 8 or so :-) they were needed in the computer room. It was cold in there! The other reason I liked going with her when she had to work Saturdays: it was always air-conditioned.
- robin_reala 16y agoMe too. All my first drawings are crayon-on-punchcard. This would have been ‘83,‘84, guess my Dad’s computing department we somewhat behind the times!
- zavulon 16y agoMe too! Punch cards and punch tape.. rolls and rolls of it. And for me, it was 88-89, because Russia was (and still is) a backwards country.
- omouse 16y agoSo wait, you're bitching that programmers were forced to think and to proof-read? Using a pen + paper to write programs isn't a huge deal and I'd do it more often if it weren't for the retarded amounts of API docs you have to wade through nowadays before writing a complete program.
- edw519 16y agoSo wait, you're bitching that programmers were forced to think and to proof-read? 1. On any given day, how many times does a compile (or interpretation) of your work fail? 2. On any given day, how many times does a test run of your program give anything other than the most desirable result? If your answer to either question is less than 2, then you're either (a) not working enough or (b) the greatest programmer in the history of the world. I was not "bitching". I was pointing out that in those days you usually got "one shot per day". Think about how this one little fact affected everything you did. There was no such thing as "Release early and often," "Ready, Fire, Aim," "Iterate, iterate, iterate," "Prototype," or "Get User Feedback ASAP." The existing technology simply didn't permit it. When you got one compile per day, you damn well better spend 6 hours per day proofreading. How many hours per day to you spend proofreading? If it's more than .5, then you're wasting your time. It is your morale imperative to use technology to do that for you. We laugh at those pictures and those days, but forget how hardcore you really had to be. We're all standing on the shoulders of giants. Respect.
- jhpriestley 16y agoI often go days or weeks between successive compilations of my programs. Not everyone programs in the "Ready, Fire, Aim" style, nor does everyone agree that it is the best.