In 1966 my First Major was Chemical Engineering.

I had to take Fortran Programming. I had just finished going through and checking all my punch cards and was walking to the reader/printer to print off my cards for a major test when I tripped and dropped all my cards. That was when I knew I did not want to be a programmer.

Hand calculators had just become available, we were not allowed to use them, had to use slide rules.

The calculators were very expensive, I could not afford one. I asked my Granddad if he would get me one. His response was: "Why".

This photo is 5 megabytes of cards.

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Who are? "They"

My dad had an engineering background and I think he was still a carrying a slide rule in a leather holder daily until maybe the early 1970s. I never learned to use one. There must be a lot of abandoned slide rules in desk drawers.

Many years ago I worked in the economic research division of a exporting company in Memphis. We had a remote batch set up. We would input cards and the data to a large computer in Washington, DC. The output would print out in our Memphis office. I had a secretary who was a true southern belle. Very lady like and nothing ever bothered her.

One day I heard a disturbance in the card reader room and walked down the hall to check it out. There was Donna kicking the **** out of the card reader. I quickly sprinted back to my office.

Ed

Oh boy I remember cards. I took a SAS (Statistical Analysis System) class in grad school in the very early 80s and it was still all cards zapped through the reader on the IBM360 at the "computer center." Fortunately most of my "programs" were less than 150 cards; still a pain if you got them out of order in any way.

Dropped cards bundles mostly in the afternoons or evening and the "green-bar" printouts were usually available first thing in the morning. Can't tell you how many times I picked up 24 pages of error statement because I forgot a semi-colon.

Bryan

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Ordnung muss sein
SWHF #789

I love the opening sequence of Adam 12 with the cards going down the belt to dispatchers. Not sure if they were punch cards but look like them. We used complaint cards that got punched in time clocks - received / dispatched / arrived / cleared.

My computer experience goes back a little earlier. At Ohio State, they had their own programming language called SCATRAN. It was some modification or improvement of FORTRAN, but I never knew what the differences were. Anyway, your program had to be done using punch cards. A large program could produce a deck several inches thick. The problem was that you had to drop your completed deck into the black hole and wait maybe a day for someone to run it on the mainframe (which I never laid eyes on). When you returned to pick up the results, likely as not it did not run because of some simple input error. Which meant you had to find and correct the error, and possibly repeat the whole process several times before you got a successful run. It was very frustrating. No one even thought about a PC back then. In the late 1960s, we had some kind of cumbersome programmable digital calculator about the size of a breadbox at a place I worked. I never did figure out how to use it. It was easier to use a slide rule or mechanical calculator.

From the look on the lady's face in your post, I assume she had been tasked to pick up the cards you dropped.

When I first went to work in the late 70s, I was considered the computer whizz because I knew how to program in BASIC on a Commodore PET. Apparently, my high school was the only one in the county to teach any computer skills.

My first task at work was to write a program to process the paper tape output of an old data logger system. This was previously done on a mainframe via a terminal with a tape reader. I did this successfully, but I was unhappy with the throughput, the tape reader kind of chunked along like the old equipment. I refined my software and pretty soon the tapes screamed through the reader...right up until I demonstrated this to my boss. He flat out refused to believe that the tape could be read at that speed and demanded that I only use my clunky program. This was despite having showed him several times that the results were the same. It wasn't my last brush with Luddites in that part of my career.

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Release the Kraken

As a land title examiner/title insurance underwriter I plotted descriptions of parcels of land using regular pencils, colored pencils. protractors, measuring scales and compasses. They were all hand tools that were probably used for decades. About half way through my career somebody came up with a computer program that would plot a legal description after all the bearings and distances were put in. I couldn't make that program work to save my life. One little error inputting the data would cause the plotting not to close back at the point of beginning I think I did pretty well over 38 years just using my hand tools.

I'm in High School Class of 74, we had a card system for taking tests starting in about 1971 or 72. Color the correct dot 1 thru 5 for a computer graded answer sheet. It also put a small hashmark on the edge of the card for the answer. You could look at the stack and see how many got a question right or wrong. The first thing the students learned was check the grading key against the actual test! Half the time the teacher used the wrong key for the test given!

That school didn't have any computer classes until the 89-90 school year. The computers arrived and the teachers didn't understand how to unpack them! Much less how to use them. My niece was a freshman and had a computer at home. She ended up teaching the class and did a better job than the teachers ever could have, but she didn't get to learn a thing that year. When she was a freshman in college, she got to take a 2 semester class on Microsoft Excel. We all learned that a spread sheet can do anything but tuck you in bed at night! That was about 1994. That is all ancient technology now!

A company I worked for did almost everything on Excel spreadsheets! To the point some nitwit used the for basic e-mails!

If I wrote your story the only thing I would have to change is the date to 1967.

I took it as an adventure. However, junior and senior years in high school we had a computer club, so I learned a little ahead of time. We used the same mainframe computer that I would eventually use in the University.

Our University mainframe was as big as a KMart store and the IBM 360 to remotely read the cards in the Chemical Engineering Building was almost as big as a VW Beetle.

My senior project was designing a computer optimization program for chemical process control. My second project was designing a process to convert SO2 from a coal fired power plant into synthetic gypsum that had a marketable value. Little did I know at the time that some 8 years later I would be the lead engineer developing the equipment to actually use that by-product.

I realize the punch cards were a pita, but they got the job done. Just maybe that technology lead to the PCs and PLCs of today.

PS - I still have my slide rule. It's a Post Brand ChemE model with the periodic table of elements and everything. I paid for it in cash from my first paycheck flippin' burgers at McD.

Were there anyone who could get through a deck without mistakes? I
sure couldn't, I hated the Fortran class, soured me on computer programming.

If you hated FORTRAN then Pascal would have put you in the funny farm. It required great attention to detail when setting the type of a given variable. It made moving complex numbers in and out of subroutines a Class-A PITA. In the version we had on a HP 9816, there was a means to disable type checking, but we were severely cautioned against using it.


For real amusement, try doing complex numbers in EXCEL.

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Release the Kraken

Had my first experience with programming in 70 or 71 in high school. A level of tedium this hyper kid couldn’t stand. We used basic punched into yellow tape and I believe the mainframe was in an administration building somewhere in my school district.My son started using computers in 3rd grade in 92 .I had a lot of catching up to do lol

I jumped into programming with C/C++
While I did not have punch cards to scatter to the four winds, I had plenty else to deal with in debug.
This began my growing hatred for technology. As a programmer, it can be no more blatantly obvious that these machines do not serve us, we serve the machine.

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it just needs more voltage

Been there, done that! In my first semester of grad school in the Fall of 1965, I had two classes that required us to do data analyses using early versions of the old BIOMED computer based statistical program. After getting my share of the dreaded "thin green-bar printouts" consisting of nothing but error messages, I learned to go to the computer center after midnight. The turnaround was only minutes instead of hours, as it was during the day, and I could quickly correct my command card mistakes and get a glorious "thick green-bar printout". I lost a lot of sleep, but saved a lot of time.

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What, me worry?

I still have my original Dietzgen protractor. It's scratched up like you wouldn't believe and has a big crack through it, but the bearings have still held up for 38 years of use, so get me a pencil, lined paper and a scale and I can still draw deed lines with it.

Those cards bring back some not so good memories. When I was in the Air Force back in the early 70's and you got one it usually meant you were due at the shot clinic for an inoculation for something like the Bubonic Plague or worse.

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Why duck?? It's a 9mm!

Still have nightmares about Fortran and those punch cards. I was a history major but still took Fortran, aero, astro, mechanical engineering, calculus, chem and physics. Still have all of my slide rules.

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Mike
S&WCA #3065

Still have nightmares about Fortran and those punch cards. I was a history major but still took Fortran, aero, astro, mechanical engineering, calculus, chem and physics. Still have all of my slide rules.

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Mike
S&WCA #3065

I recall those days. I was not a programmer, but when the Hospital went to installing computers in my Patient Accounting department, I took a COBAL course to learn just enough to be able to converse with the programmers. I remember the huge trays of cards in my accounts receivables. We then went to a System 3 and it used the smaller square cards. Then the day came in the 80's when it was all on line and we got PC's to sit on our desks. We had to take in house training to learn how to use them. I recall one training session where we went around the room and gave our name and hire date and a little other info and used that to build a data base. When I said hired March 30 1969 one of the lab girls said, "that's before I was born". Does make you feel old, and that was 40+ years ago.

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H Richard
SWCA1967 SWHF244

Some memories of Fortran and decks of punch cards.
The Drum Control card for use with the key punch,
There was a field on the punch cards that we used for indexing numbers of the cards.
IF/when you dropped the deck you could sort by number.

Slide Rules:
Most of us had a Post Versalog.
I have an aluminum Pickett in the truck.
Mileage / Distance / Time / Fuel calculations.
No batteries required.

Fortran, Snobol and Cobal all are bad memories and a comma out of place screwed it all up. The only good thing about the ComSci building was it was climate controlled and always comfortable!

Back in '71-'72 I had a night job cleaning a bank. Every night I loaded up trays of punch cards in my '63 BelAir to bring to the scrapyard in the morning. Got $.03/lb for white and $.02/lb for colored. A five hundred pounds a day added up and the bank saved on disposal. Joe

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Behavior Creates Destiny

One stupid hole in the wrong place, whiteout doesn’t work on punch cards. On the other hand, the spoiled ones were useful for your punchcard Christmas wreath.

Still have both a linear slide rule with the CD offset by "PYE" (and not the eatable version). Used this in high school in the UK in the middle 1950s. Then there is an Otis King circular "slip stick" which is the equivalent of a 60" slide rule, never seen (by me) in the "Wilds of the USA." Still functional. Then nothing like using Fortran 2 but in the non-card counting version of the IBM card holder. Used this to calculate some "very elementary by today's standards" aminoacid locations in a simple protein. Thanks to whom ever worked out how to use positions 73-80 in an IBM card as the card's number. Can find those chaps who used the 1-72 spaces because they write their "V" in magic marker on the top like this "!/" though join up the bottom space, so that when you dropped the deck you had a fair chance of putting it back close to where the cards should be. Then we used to send the deck to the ATLAS super computer (less than in a simple watch of the 1990s) at Harwell by train!! Three weeks later you got your results. Yes, those were the days when you rapidly learned that at time "approximations were just as valid as the program". When I ended up as a Post-doc at the University of Georgia's Biochem department in 1968, I was very happy because my labs were above the computer section and it was "air-conditioned" in the GA summer. Dave_n

Re: Dropping a handful of Punch Cards - We drew a diagonal line with a Texta on the top of the deck - easy to put back in order!

Ahh: Assembler, Advanced Assembler, Fortran, Basic, RPG, COBOL, C/C++, the list goes on!
Who can remember that MultiPlan was the predecessor of Excel?

[Former MCSE....]

Of course no one could. Fixing errors was a way of life.

But truthfully, it's no different today. Whether it's AutoCad or Excel, type in one wrong letter and then you have to fix it.

The only improvement today is that it's much easier to fix because you don't have to find where the fixed card will slip in.

OTOH, all those nights on the mainframe worked out well. My Engineering Team partner had a sister that was a hot chick. We will be shortly celebrating our 50th on a Caribbean cruise.

Assembly makes me twitch.
I still occasionally use it when I leave myself no other choice but to program something from the PIC16F series

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it just needs more voltage

If you think that a hand full of punch cards was a bummer,

I guess you never got to the next step wiring one of the computer boards to program a job !!

I only did it , for a hot Babe that was in the class.

However I did still end up with a Buisness Major, when all was done!

In High School, one of the math teachers offered a before/after/during lunch computer lab. We learned Fortran-IV, COBOL, and RPG. You would work out a flow chart for your program, write your code, and then sit down at the key punch machine.

Your card deck would go across town to the technical High School on Tuesday, and your output would return on Thursday. If there were bugs, then you had until the next Tuesday to get them worked out.

What this taught me is that I would rather be an analyst than a programmer.

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Only a cold warrior

We had a mechanical calculator when I was in machine drafting school in 1967-68. It looked like and was almost as big as a cash register. I still have my slide ruler.

My dad was so fast with a slip stick that he could start fires with it.

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Music/Sports/Beer fan

Memories of Chinese statistics grad students and Euro Commie Econ instructors at Michigan State have pushed back memories of IBM 360s (behind glass and above false floors for electric and cooling) and dreadful key punch machines. Thanks for the memories. My Divison HQ i
n Germany had computers that lived in OD tractor trailers and hummed
along without me. Above my pay grade and outside my MOS. I just typed for DA-1s on a defective Underwood 5 manual typewriter.
Been a while.

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It's what I do, not what I am.

[QUOTE=GypsmJim;141806904]Of course no one could. Fixing errors was a way of life.

But truthfully, it's no different today. Whether it's AutoCad or Excel, type in one wrong letter and then you have to fix it.

/QUOTE]

That's for darn sure. When you are plotting a legal description by computer program, if you put a deed line in as N(orth) 30 degrees 17 minutes 28 seconds E(ast) instead of S(outh) 30 degrees 17 minutes 28 seconds E(ast) all you will have is a very disjointed line instead of a picture of a building lot.

Oh yes. Went to Colorado State, studied Computer Programming.
Got directed Duty, Computer Puke!
But - First go to SEA.
Then hang around, keep on keeping on.
Then Got assigned to the SAC Target Shop.
But I’m deemed essential here in the Pacifico.
Really?
Years later at a Records Check, I got the Computer AFSC (job identity) removed.
So I escaped and evaded ever being a Computer Puke.

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NRA LIFE MEMBER

Not a computer programmer but a bit of a story. In the early 1970's STP installed a computer center in the basement of a building in the town where I was a firefighter and we experienced a flood. When we arrived there were punch cards floating all over the basement, we started to try and retrieve them and dry them but it was a useless task. Andy Granatelli actually showed up on the scene and was beside himself.

Now, who would installed a computer center in a basement? Our town had done the same and lost many records but thankful not the payroll information! Some valuable lessons learned that day.

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John. SWCA #1586

I still have my slide rule, actually two of them. K&E log-log duplex decitrigs. One regular size, one pocket size. The small one lives in my truck's glove compartment. I use it to calculate gas mileage and rarely a few other calculations. I haven't used my longer rule for many years. In my first job after graduation, my engineering group office had a much longer slide rule, maybe about 2', that extra length allowed a little more precision in calculation. I haven't forgotten how to use one. Pocket calculators pretty well killed slide rules 50 years ago. And now we have digital calculators in iPhones.

At one point at my first employer, I was offered the job of taking over the data processing department, or whatever it was called at the time, simply because I knew a little bit about computers and programming (at least I knew what a DO loop was), and no one else did. And this was at the HQ of a major NYSE chemical company. It didn't take me too long to decline the offer. As it turned out, that may have been a pivotal decision. Had I accepted, my career (and life) would probably have turned out entirely different than it did.

I was talking with a kid from another school during one of my son's robotics meets a few years ago. I told him my son had taught himself to program. He asked me if I knew any programming. I told him that I learned FORTRAN in college, but really didn't use it afterward.

The kid looked at me and said, "You can really make a lot of money writing FORTRAN these days. There are companies still running old systems that use it. The trouble is everyone who knew how to write it is either retired or dead."

Thanks, kid.


I think.

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Or something like that . . .

Like the old saying goes, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure!“

I started out in the early 80’s majoring in Civil Engineering. FORTRAN and COBOL were 2 things that made me graduate with a Business degree!
Larry

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Miss Buddies crsides & fat tom

Same with Assembler, COBOL and PL/1. Many large businesses that have been using computers since the '50's, '60's or '70's still run mainframes and these languages are the backbone of their processing. There are billions of lines of code executing regularly with fewer and fewer supporting analysts. I was a COBOL guy and every now and then think about brushing up on the old skill set and hitting the open market as a consultant, but that really sounds too much like work .

Back in the early 80s, my group got its very first IBM PC to do oil and gas property evaluations. As I remember, everything on it was priced separately, even the PC DOS OS (Windows was far in the future) and the whole package ended up costing about $20K. I had to hire a consultant to write the software to do what we needed done (I have a separate saga tale about that). I think that was around $10K more. And the printer was also expensive. It was huge and sounded like a machine gun, had to be kept inside a soundproof compartment because it made such a racket.

I went to work for RCA in Findlay Ohio in 1969. Punch cards were going out of style then. We still used a lot of mainframe computers but 40 pound desktop units were around by the mid 1970s. WE had HP micro computer and HP2100A desktop computers when I started. They were way too pricey for home use but they were out there. At Xavier University, where I was working on my masters at that time, they were still teaching Fortran and punchcards. When I left RCA Findlay in 1976, we had computerized test equipment, desk computers connected to mainframes, and were producing microprocessor chips for the space program and defense projects. In 1985 my brother had an Apple Macintosh for his surveying business.

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Kind regards, Heinz

I missed out on the slide-rule class in high school by one year. I was in one of the last classes to use FORTRAN in college; I started and did receive a degree in Aerospace Engineering. We would "type" the cards in one building, and take them to the "computer lab / print plant" on the other side of the campus, and have to wait about 24 hours to get our printout. What I learned from all that was to proofread; I still do that whenever I type anything on a computer, including this message.

I have a couple of slide rules that belonged to one of my great uncles, and a huge mechanical calculator that belonged to my paternal grandfather. One of these days maybe I'll learn to use both.

Before the 1950's, a "Computer" was a person that did computations. My mom was a Computer! She worked for Curtis-Wright in the Finance Department calculating what their next Government contract would cost. The Engineering department Computers did the very complex stuff! That had Burrough's ELECTRIC calculators, these were mechanical calculators with a built-in sewing machine motor. Nerd humor in the late 40's and early 50's was to sneak into a guy's office and punch in an irrational number (like Pi) and let it run! They would come back from lunch to find their office full of computer printout and still printing more!

Mom could only afford to personally own a mechanical Burrough's Adding Machine. I learned to add and subtract on it, but Multiplication was easy, and never learned to divide! Rows and rows of number keys. Set a sliding decimal point marker, enter your number, then pull the lever next number pull and you have added them. OR enter the second number, the hit all 9's again and pull the lever and you subtracted!

Now with my smart phone, I can talk to it and the problem is complete!

Ivan

From National Lampoon's 1964 High School Yearbook.

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Music/Sports/Beer fan

My father was an accountant. He had one of those huge Burroughs crank-powered adding machines with about 100 keys. I think all it did was add and subtract, with calculations shown on paper tape. . In my college lab I had an electromechanical calculator, I don't remember the maker. It would add, subtract, multiply and divide. Those things must have been incredibly complicated.

let me take a different tact away from the old days and lean into the future.

I can't believe so many complain about computer languages.
I got into big iron operating systems at the beginning. All the mainframes and then Unix BSD 4.? We were a techie's techie.
Landed with RSTS and then VAX/VMS on minis which was used by almost every major university and the military. VMS I loved.
When one of my tweeks failed, the entire building started rocking, and screaming could be heard with my name attached. I had hundreds of users to keep happy. Then thousands.

In 1980, I founded a software company that consulted to IBM and Microsoft when they were trying to get started with OOP (Object Oriented Programming). We found about 1 out of a hundred professional programmers made the transition from sequential languages like Basic, Cobol, or Fortran to OOP.

OOP required you to first think Differently. You had to give up all those procedures and subroutines you had fought so hard to learn. OOP was message based and not sequential as in all prior languages. OOP had inheritance through classes and polymorphism (it acted different in different situations). Most didn't make the transition. It was easier starting with rookies.
My lady and I just sold the corporation in 2019 to Prem Watsa of Fairfield after 40 years. It has been an exciting life.
Now AI consumes me. Neural nets are what's called non-trivial programming with the most massive computer systems ever created to process millions of records. AI is all about probability. Probability goes up with the more records used to train it. I don't mean millions. I mean hundreds of millions and more. Because it's probability based, there never is an answer in AI. There is however a possibility of getting 99.9999% chance of accuracy if you TRAIN it with enough labeled samples. Enough tech.

There is no one better today at AI than Tesla with their new Dojo computer that they created specifically for the AI task. It can give them answers in minutes rather than days. Dojo today is in the top three super computers in the world. Dojo will be 100 times even faster than all others by the end of 2024. That's a lot faster.

I hope I didn't bore you to death. It doesn't seem like friendly nerds out there.
It is a brave new world. AI will change almost everything.


Prescut

I remember when the spelling was C-o-m-p-u-t-o-r.
Not anything like a programmer, but the PC, laptop, notebook, and e-mail changed and improved every court reporter’s life.
I do have slide rules that the break for the “folded” rule was split at pi.
I have seen really ancient ones where the split was at the square root of 10.
In school we called the circular rules prayer wheels.

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and what his trumpet saith

I believe that I have my stuff together on this one. If I am correct, this is a Hollerith card. I first worked with them at the University of Georgia (the Harvard university of the South) in 1976 when I was also completing the programming course work for one of my undergraduate classes.

It seems that we also used these cards in the Marine Corps in embarkation planning and the loading of ships and aircraft (C-141 & C-5A). We had large decks of cards for each unit, with the previously mentioned green and white bar paper.

Continuing forward, the Federal government used these cards for checks (i,e, payroll and tax refunds). This was before direct deposit, of course. If you received a check, you would see the various punches, and the "Do Not staple, fold, or mutilate" message.

Some states used a version of these cards for accumulating voting data and reporting and summaries, i.e. the infamous "hanging chads" vote counts and recounts.

There was certainly a broad use and application of these cards over many years.

Cheers!

Bill

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That's what we do!

All this talk about old time computers got me to thinking if I still had this thing. Well, son of a gun, I had it stashed away in my bedroom desk drawer. This is a genuine IBM Flowcharting Template that I used, believe it or not, when I was taking computer courses at night. Back then in the late 1970s and early 1980s computer programs were developed by drawing by hand flowcharts of the program, and each cutout shape represented a certain object or action. So basically the programmer creates a pictograph of what was supposed to happen when. And don't lose the sleeve, because it had the explanation for what each cutout meant. The price tag on the sleeve is all of $.52.

Now what does this have to do with an old Luddite? In a later job I constantly had to document on paper the chain of title for a parcel of real property. I recognized the similarity in the two processes. So all of my title chain sheets were drawn very precisely with straight lines using a straightedge and with very nice arrowheads to show the direction of flow of the action, just like the flowcharts for computer programs I used to draw in night school.

Anybody else remember using one of these?

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