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talk about backwards compatible

         

LifeinAsia

11:54 pm on Jun 30, 2010 (gmt 0)

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Every flow chart program I've ever seen (Visio, SmartDraw, etc.) has icons for punch cards. (For you younguns who don't know what those are- back in the old, old dark ages of IT, programmers would write their programs on thin cardboard/paper cards- a few lines of instructions/card- then feed the stack of cards into a card reader that would import them into the mainframe, which would then, hopefully, execute the program.)

The last time I had anything to do with punch cards was at my first IT job. My boss wanted to take an old program that he had (several thousand cards worth of code) and have it put onto tape. It took some looking around before we could even find some place with a working card reader, and that was close to 25 years ago!

tangor

12:03 am on Jul 1, 2010 (gmt 0)

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Fortunately we have advanced beyond the Stone Age... sorta!

Hoople

2:37 am on Jul 1, 2010 (gmt 0)

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Ah the memories of running a card through the keypunch station a second time *backwards* and then slipping it back in someones elses card deck <EG>

creeking

7:09 am on Jul 1, 2010 (gmt 0)

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punch cards, learning fortan, ......... back in the day. :)

piatkow

11:58 am on Jul 1, 2010 (gmt 0)

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Don't forget that old sorting technique the "floor sort".

I recall, must be getting on for 30 years ago, finding a deck of punch cards in a filing cabinet during an office move. I was told that they contained the source code for a major enterprise application. Pity we had scrapped our last card reader the week before!

weeks

1:26 pm on Jul 1, 2010 (gmt 0)

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Pity we had scrapped our last card reader the week before!


LOL.

Yeah, I used the cards in college working on database analysis. The sweet smell of the mini-skirted co-eds' perfume with the warm oil of the sorter and dry dust from the paper cards...

lawman

1:52 pm on Jul 1, 2010 (gmt 0)

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The sweet smell of the mini-skirted co-eds' perfume with the warm oil of the sorter and dry dust from the paper cards...


Sounds like a quote from a really bad whodunit novel. :)

LifeinAsia

3:48 pm on Jul 1, 2010 (gmt 0)

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Or a romance novel for geeks.