6 ms·
Rabbit hole: stumbling across two Portuguese punched cards
- rcarmo 2y agoLook up a guy called Pedro Aniceto - he’ll tell you so many stories of when those cards were current here (he used to courier them across town when he was a kid)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pedroaniceto 2y ago;) Punching cards was in fact my first "decent" job. There were the "punchers" and "the programmers". A real social battle...
- cafard 2y agoVery cool. Also good to see someone else still writing Perl.
- jgrahamc 2y agoMostly because I know it's installed, I can remember pretty much the entire language, and because I'd probably use Python instead but I've been bitten by some environment thing too many times.
- pedroaniceto 2y agoYes, a single variable notification in code, could cost THOUSANDS just because someone would punch ONE card with the new data, compile it (with no errors), save it on a cassete tape, (write the label of the tape with a new version number) and deliver it to the customer. There were no monitors. Computers would have a "BOITIER" (a rectangular box of coloured lamps) who coould have 3 meanings, ON, OFF and BLINKING. We're talking about 16 light points, and the interpretation of those lights would have the answer for the completed action. 3 whites and 3 reds would mean "No errors on compiling". But that action only verified syntax. Logic was another department :)
- thih9 2y agoMind blowing. 50 years later we are putting VM in a VM in a VM to send videos of funny cats along with bank transactions across the world to everyone’s wireless pocket computer.
- gpvos 2y agoIt still has great whipuptitude.
- zorked 2y agoI didn't know they used to call computers "ordenadores" in Portugal. Interesting.
- jgrahamc 2y agoThey appear to have in this book, but computadores seems to have taken over.
- madaxe_again 2y agoOrdinateur in French, still.
- nsbk 2y agoOrdenador in Spanish, still.
- pedroaniceto 2y ago'till the 80's, french was the computer dominating language. Terms like "Octeto" (portuguese for byte) were derived from french glossary (tehy had laws to prevent the english tech term colonization and still today they have a french word for every english counterpart). So, "Ordenadores" was pretty common. And before electronics took over, we had "Electrológica", refering mixed hardware like Burroughs or Gestetner.
- titanomachy 2y agoEnglish-speaking programmers still say "octet" for byte sometimes, for example when talking about IP addresses.
- jdblair 2y agoThe term "octet" is used in IETF documentation (for IP addresses, for example) to be specific that the byte is 8 bits in length. Historically the size of a "byte" on a system was machine-dependent. The industry coalesced around the 8-bit byte, and differentiated it from "machine word" in the 70s and 80s. Edit: I just checked wikipedia, and this is described there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte
- zahlman 2y ago>indicates that João A. Fernandes is paid 15$000 (15 Portuguese escudos) per hour From the linked Wikipedia article, the escudo was replaced with the Euro in 2002, at a rate of about 200 escudos to the Euro. Seems like they had quite a bit of inflation in those three or so decades.
- ajose_mr 2y agoThere was: https://www.inflationtool.com/rates/portugal/historical?utm_content=cmp-true https://www.inflationtool.com/rates/portugal/historical?utm_... I have heard a few stories about those times in the 70s and 80s where people were selling their properties and putting the money in the bank which was paying 20% interest. A bitter lesson on the difference between the nominal Vs real value of money rapidly ensued.
- nodja 2y agoI'm portuguese and there's an oddity in either this chart or my memory. When we transitioned to the euro it seemed most shops straight up converted from escudo to eurocent. So if something cost 50 escudos it would cost 50 cents. I was a teen at the time so I remember having to pay double for breakfast and arcade coinop games and people blaming the inflation for the doubled price of stuff. Yet the chart doesn't represent this. I know the price of electronics for example wasn't doubled so I wasn't expect a 100% inflation rate or anything, but I still feels it should've been higher than 4%.
- xenadu02 2y agoUh 3 years of 22% inflation (give or take) doubles prices. When you're a young kid it sure would seem like everything got twice as expensive really fast, especially since most stores and manufacturers aren't raising prices every week to track inflation. If I estimate the 10-ish years of 20% +/- 3% that's around 7x which I can't imagine.
- pedrosorio 2y agoThey were talking about 2002 when the Euro was introduced and "it felt like" prices doubled overnight. At the time (as you can see in the chart) inflation was below 4% per year.
- keybpo 2y agoFound a reference to ENIASA - Instituto de Informática de Engenharia SARL (computer science engeneering). Rereading your post, I'm not entirely sure if it was just an academic publishing from maybe the same group or if a new branch for computers derived from the mecanograph educational offers. Curious use of ordenador istead of computador as it is nowadays, makes me wonder if it was an early adoption of the term computer. It was submitted for registration and approved in 1970, according to Diário da República (similar to Federal Register in the US): https://files.dre.pt/gratuitos/3s/1970/09/1970d210s000.pdf https://files.dre.pt/gratuitos/3s/1970/09/1970d210s000.pdf , page 4, line 82 of that table. Or here: https://i.imgur.com/GyKPamu.png https://i.imgur.com/GyKPamu.png
- jgrahamc 2y agoYeah, I found that too. But that's all I found.
- pedroaniceto 2y agoRead my comment below about the french language domination
- nunobrito 2y agoIt's still "ordenador" in Spain and "ordinateur" in French. Interesting that we moved forward to computer over the years.
- ithkuil 2y agoIs this because these early computers were more often used to keep tabs and sort things (put things in order) rather than merely compute things? (I'm aware that in order to perform those tasks the processing unit will also have to perform arithmetic operations)
- anthk 2y agoOrden in Spanish means both command (mandate, instruction) and order (as from sort).
- pedroaniceto 2y agoThose were the days...
- Animats 2y agoThe book has a picture of the IBM 2321 Data Cell Drive, 1964 to 1975.[1] That's an exotic peripheral for the original IBM System/360, a tape strip library. Before disks got big, there were various mechanical kludges to select storage media from a library and move them to a read/write unit. IBM had several such mechanical systems. This one was a commercial product with modest success. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_2321_Data_Cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_2321_Data_Cell
- anthk 2y agoI love these old advertisements. BTW, even in late and mid 80's, there were adverts on the Spanish Reader's Digest on courses about computers. I rememember showing images of both PDP front panels and maybe Altair 8800, not IBM PC's. These were top notch stuff for big corporations and banks filling their offices. BTW, on the 'computadora' term, these looked outdated, and to anyone non-Latin American descent here 'computadora' would mean an old IBM mainframe the size of two wardrobes and more.
- pantulis 2y agoI remember those things being called "cerebros electrónicos".
- anthk 2y agoMore like the 60's and 70's, and infamously known because of the comic books. "Electronic Brains" in the 80's, maybe until 1981 or 1982.
- pantulis 2y agoI think it was like the 80 or 81 that my dad referred to the computer in their company as "el cerebro electrónico" and it was a IBM System/34.
- anthk 2y agoYeah, what I said. After the IBM PC began to root in Spain (and micros like the ZX Spectrum), no one used neither cerebro electrónico nor computadora.
- lubujackson 2y agoMy dad used to work in a college lab that used punch cards. I am actually using one as a bookmark right now - they make great bookmarks!
- toast0 2y agoBlank, unpunched punchcards are a great size for taking notes too.
- svilen_dobrev 2y agoso.. those real cards that fell off .by.gravity., were the originals photographed in the textbook?
- jgrahamc 2y agoNo, they were not the originals because if you look at the book versions they do not have the printed In Es Me logo on them.
- svilen_dobrev 2y agothen.. what, someone learned punching? from what's in that book? The text punched matches exactly.. Or is that some secret "code" to open gates of XYZ? p.s. it is a rabbit hole :)
- jgrahamc 2y agoFrom my blog: So, it looks like the cards were examples (perhaps from the training course) drawn from the book.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]