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I can imagine how difficult source control would be when using paper: "Hey Fred, I need sheet 7 thru 9 from revision 2.6.3!" "Which filing cabinet is it in?"
by trebor 14y ago
I can imagine how difficult source control would be when using paper: "Hey Fred, I need sheet 7 thru 9 from revision 2.6.3!" "Which filing cabinet is it in?"
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoSo a bit like backup tapes, then? ;)
- trebor 14y agoYup, like a cassette with its tape spilling out. Just imagine dropping the sheaf of papers on your way to the scanner!
- pavel_lishin 14y agoHopefully the papers would have some sort of index on them, so that the order in which they were scanned would be irrelevant. Then again, punch cards didn't.
- Retric 14y agoPunch cards were generally created by hand so the ability to cut and paste new punch cards was considered a significant advantage. This on the other hand is created by a computer and not human readable so a simple index is easy enough to add.
- jeltz 14y agoActually punch cards could have indexes. Several programming languages did not not use the last columns of the cards and reserved them for a number which could be used by card sorting machines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_sorter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_sorter
- pm24601 14y agoPunch cards were not that hard to sort after dropping them. Once you have a deck, draw some thing on the deck edges with a permanent marker making sure that all the card edges have been marked. If the deck is dropped, first of all it doesn't usually scatter that much (cards tend to stick to neighbor) and the marks on the edge help visually sort the deck pretty fast.
- brey 14y agointerestingly, that's exactly what Radix sort was invented for - non-comparison sort in O(n) time
- dredmorbius 14y agoThat's why you striped your card decks.
- vacri 14y agoThat's dangerous for long-term reliability - you need at least RAID1! ("Redundant Array of Independent Dockets"?)
- dredmorbius 14y agoStriped decks make for a better pick-up line.
- dredmorbius 14y agoAnd ... The striping actually is redundancy -- it's a redundant ordering indicator for the deck. The nominal ordering is ... the card order. But should that be disturbed, the stripe (a diagonal marking across the edge of the cards) will indicate which cards are out of sequence. I first encountered this trick in a college library with a physical card catalog. Having been pranked once too often by students re-arranging the drawers, the fronts of the catalogs were crossed with multiple bands of different colored tape. Any out of sequence drawers could be immediately noticed and quickly sorted visually.
- tcarnell 14y agoYou could even implement raid striping! For extra security and store the 'stripes' in different filing cabinets!
- trebor 14y agoYou could cheaply achieve RAID-6 this way! But data throughput might be abysmally slow though... so don't use it for servers. ;)
- evoxed 14y agoI will be nothing less than disappointed if I do not see someone on HN implement 'papernode 0.1' by the end of this weekend. Maybe some more literal multithreading action. Why not do the whole system... servers from fax machine arrays!