Joys of Computer Programming in the 1960s

martyd

martyd

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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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martyd said:
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.
Click to expand...

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
 
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.
 
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martyd said:
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.
Click to expand...


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

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.
 
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.
 
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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!
 
martyd said:
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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
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Old Arkansawyer said:
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.
Click to expand...

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.:D
 
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
 
martyd said:
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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
TXBryan said:
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
Click to expand...

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.
 
GypsmJim said:
PS - I still have my slide rule. It's a Post Brand ChemE model with the periodic table of elements and everything.
Click to expand...

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.
 
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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