I'm here at home watching a DVD of some of the old original "Dragnet" TV shows. It was showing the computer system with all of the running punch cards flying into pigeon holes. The sophistication was on a level of the game "Clue" (Colonel Mustard did it with a pipe wrench in the parlor). It's always kind of interesting to see the "state of the art" in telephones, cars and computers back in these old TV shows.

I find the same with movies and TV from the 80's.

Yep, love those old TV shows. "Emergency" was one for the latest tech. "Rampart this is Squad 51". Reel to reel recording of the conversation, paper readout of the EKG. Even the Dodge squad truck. All of a sudden I'm feeling old....

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BTDT, Got The T-Shirt

I confess to working with an IBM punch card computer during my U.S. Coast Guard career.

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U.S. Coast Guard, retired CPO

So you folded it, spindled it and
tore it. I sentence you to
13 years in the penitentiary
and fined $50,000.

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Ubi Est Mea

Remember getting those computer punch cards informing you it was time to get your shots when you were in the military?

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Why duck?? It's a 9mm!

Or "golden flow" random drug tests.

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Music/Sports/Beer fan

For my first computer classes, we had to punch our programs on cards and hand them to someone standing behind a counter. They would be run when there wasn't anything important for the "mainframe" to do.

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You're shy a few manners.

When I started with the Border Patrol, our paychecks had the punch holes in them.

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Hold my beer and watch this!

That‘s one of the things I find myself thinking frequently when watching old shows and movies:

That plot wouldn’t work if they could just google it or make a call on their cell phone ...

Yup, same here. I used to have to run complex data analysis programs using punch cards. If I made one little teeny, tiny typing error setting up my control cards, I'd end up with the dreaded "thin printout", telling me to try again another day. I learned to go to the computing center after midnight (it ran 24/7) to hand in my data decks. That way, I'd get a quick turnaround, and could quickly correct my frequent typos. To tell you the truth, even though I was young and full of energy, I don't miss those days very much.

And don't ask me about punch card dating. All I will say is, it didn't work!

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What, me worry?

I liked that giant noisy FAX machine in Bullitt!

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Thread Killer.

Ah yes, the good old days, not.

Did punch card data entry in 1964 on an IBM 027.
20 years later, CADDS4x on an IBM mainframe, I needed an hour with a notebook of instructions to run a tape backup and park the discpack, to shutdown the workstations down for the night. Annoying!

Sent from my Moto G (5) Plus using Tapatalk

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Slava Ukraini!

When I first started work we had a data logging system that produced paper tape that then had to be run through a reader into the mainframe. The paper tape reader had a rhythm a bit like a Bren gun, slow but sure.

A couple of years later we got little Commodore PET computers and a stand-alone paper tape reader that connected to the PETs. I wrote some code to read the old tapes and calculate the answers rather than use the mainframe. The look on my boss's face was priceless when the tape flew through the new reader at Warp 9 and the answers appeared on the screen. "That's too fast, it might make mistakes". Yep, he had me pad the process with no-op loops because he didn't trust speed.

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Release the Kraken

When I started my career in 1974, we had manual typewriters, and used carbon paper to make duplicate copies of documents. No pagers or cell phones, no answering machines at home, no caller ID.

If you check out the movie "All the President's Men", you see Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford in the Washington Post newsroom...with typewriters clacking away and people sitting at their desks smoking. They are using pay phones to make and receive calls from sources.

I'm working my way through the DVD box set of The Untouchables, with Robert Stack as Eliot Ness. In one episode, while on a stakeout, he tells one of his men that someday, all cars will come with radios...

In the Elvis Cole series of novels, readers/fans often commented on Cole relying on pay phones in an age of cell phones. It was several books in before he finally got himself a cell phone. Author Robert Crais said he did that intentionally to increase the tension as Cole tried to find a pay phone in order to contact someone.

In High School I had a "computer" class with tabulating machines the size of Amphicars and miles of perforated printer paper bound with rubber bands big enough to launch parking meters.

Times change.

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Music/Sports/Beer fan

My training with UNIVAC 92/9300 systems last test was to punch a card
that when read by the computer would punch a dup of the card and print
it out on the bar printer that was part of the system......
Yea, old stuff......

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Only difference Fool/Mule-ears

And yes, those punch cards.

I never worked with data entry, but when I got to university, the library's closed stacks were on a punch-card system. You'd turn in the card with the book code at the desk, and after a prescribed time you could pick up your requested book.

Not infrequently, you'd ask for "The Prussian Army in the 19th Century", and end up with "Wild Flowers of Southern Tasmania".

They always claimed you must have screwed up on the card.

That's the way I had to do it in college, taking computer courses. I'd have to create my program on punch cards, then take them to a building where the mainframe computers were (I never saw them). I'd drop the card deck wrapped in a rubber band through a slot in the wall and come back the next day to pick up the printout and the card deck. Unless I made a programming error (easily done), then I would have to find and correct the error(s) and repeat. PCs were far, far in the future.

Punch cards were before my time, but in elementary school my first exposure to computers was using a Commodore Vic20 using programs saved on a cassette. In high school I learned BASIC on a Radio Shack (Tandy?) TRS-80 using 5-1/4" floppy disks.

A friend at church ran his billing on a Radio Shack computer with a cassette drive to about 2005. "Why but a new computer because the technology changed?"

I don't remember the year but when the Apple IIc came out, we were one of the first small real estate companies to "go computer." They lasted about 2 years then went to IBM 8082 PC's (I think my 2 month old Moto 4z cell phone is about 10 times more powerful!) I was thinking that my brother was wasting our money! But one day, he printed a "Report" for me. It contained info on every apartment that the lease was up next month. Move in date and deposit, current rent, and all the identification info. We could then decide if it was time to raise their rent. We increased the annual rent buy 2% at renewal with this, but expenses were climbing at about 4.75%. That was one of the problems, rents could only raise at 6 month or 12 month intervals, the city raised tax evaluation and utility fees as often as they wished!

Ivan

Wow, this thread brought back some memories! I started my Firefighter/Paramedic career in 1970. It seems back then that computer centers were often relegated to the basement of buildings. We had a flood and the STP corporation had such an arrangement in town. We arrived in the scene to find many of thousands of punch cards floating in the water. We initially tried to retrieve the cards and dry them but it was a hopeless task. The CEO of STP, Andy Granatelli arrived on the scene and as you may recall he was a rather large man we were not sure if he was going to have a heart attack or stroke first!

Regarding the show Emergency, we were in the infancy of our Paramedic program in Illinois in 1971, I actually graduated from the first class. I went out to Los Angeles and spend two days riding with Squad 51 the unit the show was based upon, wasn't a Dodge truck at that time as they had room for me in the rear. A great learning experience for sure. When we first started the Paramedic service our EKG monitor/Defibrillator had a tiny screen for us to to try to interpret the EKG to take appropriate action, not ideal. The tape readouts we received in the later models were very much welcomed. We were required to attach the tapes to our reports to document the patient's condition and determine if our interventions were appropriate. When I retired I was the senior paramedic in the state and sure appreciated the advances in technology with the possible exception of taking 12 lead EKG's in a moving ambulance, a challenge to be sure.

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John. SWCA #1586

I've had multiple EKGs in the last year. I can't imagine trying to untangle and attach leads in a moving ambulance.

My little, semi-related story: Back in the 90s I went through EMT training (never licensed/certified/worked as an EMT, to be clear) and did my ambulance ride-along. The hardest thing I did was taking a patient's vitals in the back of a moving ambulance, with a stethoscope, BP cuff, and my watch. But I suppose those skills get better with field practice. Classroom work didn't really prepare me for that.

I hated the Fortran class as I always had a card somewhere in the
stack with a wrong punch.

Many a night, I stayed up all might to run main frame computer center programs on those punch cards and have an answer in the morning. On the lap top, the same work now only as long as it takes me to key it in,

Problems involved some syntax error, spelling error, using a comma instead of a period, not closing a parenthesis, etc., or getting cards out of order. You learned you had to be very thorough in reviewing what you had typed on the cards before submitting the deck for processing. If you didn't, it would cost you at least a day of your time. At the time, Ohio State used a programming language compiler called SCATRAN which was a modified and improved version of ALGOL and was much faster than FORTRAN. I don't know what SCATRAN stood for. Later on, I had to learn BASIC, and I did a fair amount of programming with it for awhile. That was so long ago I wouldn't have any idea how to even start to program in BASIC (or any other language) today.

I forgot about the "golden flow" tests. I used to get one of those about every two months or so. It insulted me because I wouldn't come near drugs. I questioned an officer ("off the record") who I refereed with who worked in that section. I said that half the guys I worked with were a bunch of pot heads and they never got tested. He just gave me a sweet smile and said, "We know who to test." Gotta keep those stats looking good...

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Why duck?? It's a 9mm!