5 ms·
unless they used punch cards
by debesyla 4mo ago
unless they used punch cards
- andsoitis 4mo ago> unless they used punch cards For MS-DOS?
- WalterBright 4mo agoNot likely. Punch cards disappeared around the end of 1976.
- Anonyneko 4mo agoWe still used them in the university as late as in 2010... ...as writing paper.
- MomsAVoxell 4mo agoWe still learned how to use them in the 80’s high school computer classes, mostly because we had a balance of CP/M plus card-reader/early DOS machines, eventually .. in the labs. Rich kid schools had Apples though, and some of them also had card readers for BASIC ..
- greenbit 4mo ago"[..] card readers for BASIC" Finally, a sensible use case for BASIC's "READ" and "DATA" commands. Learning BASIC as a kid on a micro, it always struck me as an odd way to get input into a program. Sure, with INPUT, you'd have to hand enter your input every time, but baking into the program meant that you'd have to edit your program any time you wanted to change anything. But with a card reader, you could "cut the deck". Keep the program cards, and then just stack on whatever set of data cards you wanted. From this vantage point, in the 21st century with our flying cars and what not, it seems really quirky that back then, even your data could be a tangible thing.
- MomsAVoxell 4mo agoIndeed, we still pay homage to the era with terms such as the stack, pushing and popping, and all kinds of things .. i remember we had fun inserting random infinite loops in other students cards on occasion until we all realized we could just have marked “finished” stacks with an X across the spine, and also to ease sorting, and so on .. i would mark certain sub-routines with different color markers on the spine too, just to see a budget for how much computing time i expected to be billed for, and so on and on .. lots of valuable hands on came from the card-based computing, its a lost art ..
- greenbit 4mo agoI remember seeing stacks of cards being carried into/out of the university "computing center" in the mid 1980s, on more than a couple of occasions. Though in retrospect, these were probably just old programs that had been in various professors offices since the mid 70s, being taken to get read into some disk in the mainframe.
- fortran77 4mo agoMy college used them for PL/I and IBM Assembly language programming classes until 1982. Cards were used well into the mid-80s.
- SoftTalker 4mo agoMy firt job out of college in the early 1990s was at an equipment manufacturer who was still using them. They had a big chart on the wall titled "punch-card elimination" and a line trending down, but it wasn't at zero yet. My work there was all new code and didn't involve any of that, however.
- BubbleRings 4mo agoI learned COBOL in college at UNC-W on punch cards in 1980.
- WalterBright 4mo agoI threw out all my punch cards. Wish I'd kept at least a listing!
- genxy 4mo agoI find punch cards being used in old engineering books I buy from the 60s. Maybe write them again?
- conorcleary 4mo agoPunch* 'em again
- Sharlin 4mo agoPunch cards are still a form of digital storage, mind.