3 ms·
Why was your office getting so many bomb threats?
by pliny 5y ago
Why was your office getting so many bomb threats?
- beardyw 5y agoHa. A minor government department. Some folks got the idea we were big brother. This was in the 70s. We had one computer between 50 or so developers. It had less than 100k memory, card input, and all tape to tape. Honestly they were deluded.
- pell 5y agoI'd love to hear so much more about how it was to work in this kind of environment back then. (Apart from those bomb threats.)
- beardyw 5y agoOff topic, but to summarise: it was (by today's standards) so so very slow. One overnight compile per developer per day. Programs were on cards which sometimes got dropped or jammed. And much more time thinking than doing.
- infradig 5y agoI used to hand write Cobol programs on coding pads, send them off to data-entry to be typed up and saved to tape. Then I would take the tape to ops, they would run an upload and compile when things were quiet. Get the listing back with errors, then create patches on punch-cards to apply fixes. Talking circa 1977 here.
- beardyw 5y agoYes, a similar pattern except I started in 71. Coding on sheets but then punched up onto cards. The cards were printed along the top edge so you could riffle through your program in a box. The more senior people were used to punching their own cards on a 12 button hand punch. I never got the hang of that. [Edit] oh, and chewing some card to push into a hole to make a fix.
- 9dev 5y agoWhich is what someone working for big brother would say, of course.