4 ms·

>“This deck of punch cards worked all over the world except in Australia, and what was happening was customs inspectors, when they inspected things like light b

>“This deck of punch cards worked all over the world except in Australia, and what was happening was customs inspectors, when they inspected things like light bulbs, would pull one out at random to check. They did the same thing with the punch cards, and put them back out of order." That is amazing.

Zenst 7y ago
Yip, back then you always double rubber banded your deck of punched cards, some triple banded, least those whose first floor shuffle drop was down some stairs. Funny one was when a friend of mine interrupted the typist punching my coding sheet onto punched cards. He kept putting a typed page back into the untypes pile of what was 5 pages. Got the deck and was mildly flummoxed what was wrong as had a chunk of code repeated 3 times (the number of times he did it without the typist noticing). But one perk of punched cards - removing lines of code is as easy as removing the associated card. Also be mindful of prankster who would stick random cards into your deck if you left it unattended, added a real new meaning to joker in the deck. Today, they would just call it a code injection exploit. Which is why I and others would often sign the deck along the edge of the cards and do some lines at various angles on the other long end so you instantly see if something is amiss. Today they would call that signed code.
amatecha 7y ago
One thing I'm wondering -- were the punch cards numbered/identifiable, at least? haha
- m463 7y ago
  you could make an angled line with a sharpie down the side of the deck.
  - Causality1 7y ago
    That's a very handy trick I'll have to remember.
- shakna 7y ago
  Several Australian universities at the time had punch card sorters. They were extremely loud and took an extremely long time, and I'm not quite sure what they used to mark the placement of the cards, but they mostly worked.
- thesmok 7y ago
  In USSR they were numbered: two digit serial number was printed on blank cards. I'm not that old, but used punch cards were used for note taking in my local library in 90's.
- cpr 7y ago
  Some languages (I think Cobol) allowed the last 8 columns of punched cards to contain sequence numbers for physical sorting...
m463 7y ago
At least they didn't fold, spindle or mutilate them.

Zenst 7y ago

Yip, back then you always double rubber banded your deck of punched cards, some triple banded, least those whose first floor shuffle drop was down some stairs. Funny one was when a friend of mine interrupted the typist punching my coding sheet onto punched cards. He kept putting a typed page back into the untypes pile of what was 5 pages. Got the deck and was mildly flummoxed what was wrong as had a chunk of code repeated 3 times (the number of times he did it without the typist noticing). But one perk of punched cards - removing lines of code is as easy as removing the associated card. Also be mindful of prankster who would stick random cards into your deck if you left it unattended, added a real new meaning to joker in the deck. Today, they would just call it a code injection exploit. Which is why I and others would often sign the deck along the edge of the cards and do some lines at various angles on the other long end so you instantly see if something is amiss. Today they would call that signed code.

amatecha 7y ago

One thing I'm wondering -- were the punch cards numbered/identifiable, at least? haha

m463 7y ago
you could make an angled line with a sharpie down the side of the deck.
- Causality1 7y ago
  That's a very handy trick I'll have to remember.
shakna 7y ago
Several Australian universities at the time had punch card sorters. They were extremely loud and took an extremely long time, and I'm not quite sure what they used to mark the placement of the cards, but they mostly worked.
thesmok 7y ago
In USSR they were numbered: two digit serial number was printed on blank cards. I'm not that old, but used punch cards were used for note taking in my local library in 90's.
cpr 7y ago
Some languages (I think Cobol) allowed the last 8 columns of punched cards to contain sequence numbers for physical sorting...

m463 7y ago

At least they didn't fold, spindle or mutilate them.