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My dad was recruited out of college to write code. Upon showing up for work, he was told they’d ordered the computer but it wouldn’t arrive for another six mon
by mattrp 7y ago
My dad was recruited out of college to write code. Upon showing up for work, he was told they’d ordered the computer but it wouldn’t arrive for another six months. In the meantime, They’d arranged time on another computer (one of only two in the state) so he’d spend the day writing and then he and another guy would load up their punch cards and drive an hour each night to load the other computer and test the code. At one point they had an intern managing the hundreds of cards representing the software they were writing. They came in one morning and he joyously informed them he had decided it would be better to sort the thousand plus cards by color.
- jibal 7y agoWhat year and what state? I was programming on an IBM 1620 at the local junior college in Van Nuys, California in 1965 while I was still a student at the high school across the street, and there were at least two other IBM 1620's at schools in the San Fernando Valley, and of course numerous computers at banks and other institutions throughout the state.
- kick 7y agoCouldn't it have been basically every state outside of Wisconsin, New York, Massachusetts, Virginia, Connecticut, California, and maybe Illinois in 1965? EDIT: and Texas.
- mattrp 7y ago1968 in North Carolina. I think it was a 360 but I can’t recall exactly. I remember as a kid visiting the office and the computer was housed in a fairly large room where several people worked - mostly women. In fact my mom would joke that the reason he liked work so much was because he worked with virtually all women. It’s possible there were more than two but maybe he was saying only two they could buy time on? I have no idea how many 360s were around back then but that’s how I recall how he told the story.
- jibal 7y ago"maybe he was saying only two they could buy time on?" Probably so. Thanks for filling in the details.
- dluan 7y agoRichard Feynman told a story that when he was at Los Alamos during WW2, he was put in charge of the nascent computing group using the brand new IBM computers to run physics calculations. The army recruited a bunch of high school math whiz kids to handle all the punch card loading and running the machines, and Feynman was in charge of the kids. Eventually the pressure from Feynman to keep up the pace of calculation was so great that the kids, keeping track of program progress in their heads, would yell at him anytime he came into the computer room to ask a question because it meant losing track and having to restart the programs which were many, many cards. This meant losing days of precious time if they had to start over or if a program broke. Finally the kids got so stressed debugging (and failing to debug) these long running programs that they devised a way to run multiple programs at alongside each other by color coding the punch cards, and then recording break points in the programs when they failed. This allowed them to keep the machines always running with one kid in charge the different variants of the programs they were running.
- mattrp 7y agoSuch a cool story - I can’t imagine working with such constraints. Today if you need to add 20tb of storage, you add it. A few clicks, maybe a cup of coffee and you’re done.
- cdelsolar 7y agoThere were computers with punch cards and programs during WW2? I thought the first programmable computer was ENIAC (post-war)
- hcs 7y agoThese were semi-automatic calculators, the punch cards were all data. The problem with distracting the workers was that they were mostly responsible for enacting the program! http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/34/3/FeynmanLosAlamos.htm http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/34/3/FeynmanLosAlamos.h... , search for IBM.