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> I saw on more than one occasion grown men brought to tears because they dropped a box of cards scattering them across the floor and they would have to spend m

> I saw on more than one occasion grown men brought to tears because they dropped a box of cards scattering them across the floor and they would have to spend many hours sorting them. I realize I may be a bit late with this suggestion, but why not number the cards, like the pages of a book?

adrian_b 3y ago
They were normally numbered. However that means that it was possible to sort them, not that it was possible to sort them (manually) in a short time. Since a card was a program text line, there were frequently many thousand cards in a program and the smallest programs had a few hundreds.
- KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
  And that's why every poor sod in CS have to learn sorting :)
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- Nihilartikel 3y ago
  Back when I was employed as an office peon for a summer myself and a few interns were tasked with alphabetizing about a thousand file folders. Fresh from my algorithms course, I organized a parallel meat space merge sort. And it went pretty quickly. Everyone started with very small random stacks to order, and then merging the pre sorted stacks was relatively quick mindless work.
  - JamesLeonis 3y ago
    This is a great example of Computer Science is not about Computers.
  - pmarreck 3y ago
    “concurrent meatspace mergesort” I like it
- darkerside 3y ago
  There's an alternative steampunk future where punch cards continued to be the programming medium of choice, and DX is all about better managing the sorting, organization, and secure carriage of punch cards to the supercomputer lab. Yes, a separate lab. After all, for sufficient sizes of data, sneakernet is more efficient than network cables anyway.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
sseagull 3y ago
I thought everyone quickly learned to draw a diagonal like across the top with a marker. That helps get things approximately where they need to be. At least that's what I heard from the older professors at my university.
- Baeocystin 3y ago
  The diagonal sharpie was taught to me day 1 by my prof at the time. FWIW.
- PeterStuer 3y ago
  It's analogous to backups Everyone is thaught these are important to do, and it isn't realy much work, but the times i've seen students lose weeks of thesis work because of storage crash ...
todd8 3y ago
Cards were often numbered for finished programs, but during development any change or refactoring would invalidate the numbers and the diagonal lines drawn on the side of a deck of cards. Some of the larger comp centers had data processing equipment that would number a stack of cards by punching the card number in the reserved columns 73-80. Card sorters could then sort a mixed up deck using a radix sort in a few passes. See my nearby comments.

adrian_b 3y ago

They were normally numbered. However that means that it was possible to sort them, not that it was possible to sort them (manually) in a short time. Since a card was a program text line, there were frequently many thousand cards in a program and the smallest programs had a few hundreds.

KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
And that's why every poor sod in CS have to learn sorting :)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Nihilartikel 3y ago
Back when I was employed as an office peon for a summer myself and a few interns were tasked with alphabetizing about a thousand file folders. Fresh from my algorithms course, I organized a parallel meat space merge sort. And it went pretty quickly. Everyone started with very small random stacks to order, and then merging the pre sorted stacks was relatively quick mindless work.
- JamesLeonis 3y ago
  This is a great example of Computer Science is not about Computers.
- pmarreck 3y ago
  “concurrent meatspace mergesort” I like it
darkerside 3y ago
There's an alternative steampunk future where punch cards continued to be the programming medium of choice, and DX is all about better managing the sorting, organization, and secure carriage of punch cards to the supercomputer lab. Yes, a separate lab. After all, for sufficient sizes of data, sneakernet is more efficient than network cables anyway.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

sseagull 3y ago

I thought everyone quickly learned to draw a diagonal like across the top with a marker. That helps get things approximately where they need to be. At least that's what I heard from the older professors at my university.

Baeocystin 3y ago
The diagonal sharpie was taught to me day 1 by my prof at the time. FWIW.
PeterStuer 3y ago
It's analogous to backups Everyone is thaught these are important to do, and it isn't realy much work, but the times i've seen students lose weeks of thesis work because of storage crash ...

todd8 3y ago

Cards were often numbered for finished programs, but during development any change or refactoring would invalidate the numbers and the diagonal lines drawn on the side of a deck of cards. Some of the larger comp centers had data processing equipment that would number a stack of cards by punching the card number in the reserved columns 73-80. Card sorters could then sort a mixed up deck using a radix sort in a few passes. See my nearby comments.