Any punch card computer videos out there?

[thermodynamics]

One of my Professors who "has been around for a while" is an expert in mechanism design. Yesterday in class he was talking about the history of the mechanism design field, and how things started out in the early days of computers. Specifically, he told tales of spending entire days in graduate school (when he was younger) punching punch cards to go into the Mechanical Engineering department's IBM 360 computer.

Since the vast majority of the class was born after 1980, we have never seen a punch card computer operate, let alone see one in a museum.

A quick search through YouTube didn't yield much. I was hoping some of the "more experienced" members of JUB might point us in the right direction.

 

[Jannus]

I am quite experienced with the IBM punch card machine, but I don't know what you mean by a "punch card computer video." Video cameras were not common in the days of the punch card. so you'll not find many people who videotaped their use of the punch card machine. Video tape then was a one inch wide strip, and cameras and video recorders were the stuff of the A/V Department.

Programs were submitted as stacks of cards to the clerk behind the counter in the data center. Each card represented one line of your program. The cards needed to be stacked in the correct order, as the card reader read them sequentially and fed the instructions to the mainframe in the order in the stack. God forbid if you should drop your stack of cards!

The IBM punch card machine was a strangely satisfying machine to use. It had a very characteristic sound, which gave you auditory feedback that each card had been completed and stacked, and the keyboard had a very nice tactile feel to it.

It was traditional at the end of the semester to go to the top of the highest building on campus (11 stories at my small midwestern school) and toss your stack of program cards out onto the people on the plaza below, like giant confetti.You would not dare do this, however, until grades had been reported.

 

[Jannus]

You might also want to take a look at my thread from June on Unix commands.

http://www.justusboys.com/forum/showthread.php?t=165247

 

[mark1111]

Don't forget the "program." Big boards with holes in a grid pattern that you would use cables when placed in the right holes, and then locked in place on the ... I think it was the card reader, would make everything work. The card reader was about the size of a station wagon.

I know this cause I'm from a small town and this is what they taught us in "computer lab" at the high school. Funny since it was older than the building, and the next year the school bought something like 20 pc's.

 

[Jannus]

^ The "program" is the pattern of holes in the cards themselves. Each card is one line of your program. The card punch machine typed the text of the program line on the edge of each card so you'd know which line of code that card represented.

And the card readers weren't tiny, but they weren't quite the size of a station wagon! Here's one, sitting on a shelf:

 

[Jannus]

...he told tales of spending entire days in graduate school (when he was younger) punching punch cards to go into the Mechanical Engineering department's IBM 360 computer.

Since the vast majority of the class was born after 1980, we have never seen a punch card computer operate, let alone see one in a museum.

I don't mean to insult your intelligence themodynamics, but it suddenly occurred to me that I may not have been entirely clear in my posts above. There was never any such thing as a "punch card computer." All mainframes featured several means by which programs could be loaded into the computer and compiled. One of the most popular was to encode your program (in whatever language) in the form of holes in special computer cards. You would write your program out on a note pad and then buy a stack of blank computer cards from the bookstore. You'd bring both to the data center (which operated 24/7 at my school) and load your stack of blank cards onto the IBM card punch machine. Your would then copy your hand-written program onto the cards by typing it out, line by line, on the card punch machine. As I mentioned above, each line of your program was encoded onto a single card. Once you had completed typing out your program, you would wrap your stack of cards with a rubber band and hand it to the clerk behind the counter at the data center. (The clerks were usually computer science majors who took the job as a form of work/study). The clerk would load your stack of cards into the card reader, which would then feed the instructions to the mainframe, line by line, in the order of the cards in the stack. Your stack of cards would then be returned to you. This would compile your program, but not run it. Once compiled, you could then run your program from any terminal anywhere on or off campus. You would then begin the process of debugging your program. Those lines of code that were suspect would be corrected and the new line retyped onto a new card and inserted carefully into the appropriate spot in your stack. Obviously, you needed to be careful to pull out the old bad card and insert the new good one(s). This is why you couldn't number the cards in the stack to keep them in order - the order was constantly changing since you were (inevitably) constantly changing your program. That's why it was such a disaster if you dropped your stack of cards! You would then resubmit your corrected stack and recompile your program. The process was labor-intensive (and frustrating) by today's standards. (That's why we enjoyed tossing our card stacks out the windows after grades were posted at the end of semester!)

One of the reasons the punch cards were preferred was that they gave you a hard copy of your program (which you would not get if you just typed it into the computer via a dumb terminal). Moreover, the punch cards and programs were platform independent. You could submit the same stack of cards to an IBM 370 or a Univac 9000 and the same program would compile on either (assuming, of course, that a compatible version of the language in which your program was written was available on each machine).

A box of various computer programs, on cards:

Anyway, the punch cards were not peculiar to any type or model of computer. Essentially all mainframes used them. I believe the format was developed by IBM, and every punch card machine I ever saw was made by IBM, so they may have had some sort of patent on the card punch system. But my college used a Univac 9000, and I submitted many a program to that Univac on IBM punch cards.

In honor of your professor, here is a picture of an IBM 360 computer (at left, with the front panels removed). The card reader is the blue device off to the right of the main computer (it looks like it has pink cards loaded into it).:

 

[chas007]

Oooo I remember back in high school ( 1968-1971), I took a business class that dealt with using different machines in the business world at that time.

One of our projects was to use this punch machine and create a very basic small spread sheet. We punch the cards, sorted the cards and then wired the board so that it would print.

Like someone said earlier, if you were off by one digit, and/or one wire placed in the wrong hole, it would not print out correctly or your figures would not be correct.

Wow... we have sure come a long way.

 

[flood22]

Wow... we have sure come a long way.

Or have we?

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

 

[purina]

My Mother used to make Christmas wreaths out of punch cards and cardboard pzza discs. I think there's a box of cards still in the garage somewhere.

 

[jspk]

haha. now i know what my boss is talking about. he always joke about it when we start talking ms & unix. good thing we have laptop now

 

[barefootbob]

when I was in high school (mid 70's)we had a terminal to an IBM 360 and used punch cards to send to it .. and YES I FUCKING DROPPED MY STACK OF CARDS !!! talk about being pissed off. However, I was 'lucky' in that I numbered my cards for just such an emergency, but it still took the rest of the class to get them back in order.

We also had to be able to read the Hollerith code, all those holes in the card. We had an ancient, even for 1975, punch card machine that you had to know some of the Hollerith code to be able to use it.

We also had a printer that was the size of a small car and weighed the same that you had to use the pins and jacks to program it as to how to print. This thing would shake the building, we were on the second floor, when it printed thus really pissing of the girls in home ec trying to bake cakes, of course the cakes would collapse.

 

[Jannus]

^ Your high school was pretty advanced for 1975, Bob. My high school didn't get it's first computer until well into the 1980s. Consider that the first Apple was only built in a garage in California in 1976, and the first IBM PC didn't hit the market until 1981 (I seem to remember it had 48 or 64K RAM, no hard drive, one 5.25 inch floppy, and a monochrome monitor. I think it sold for $4,000.00)

 

[Jannus]

My Mother used to make Christmas wreaths out of punch cards and cardboard pzza discs. I think there's a box of cards still in the garage somewhere.

In honor of purina's mother:

I spent my holiday scanning in old familty photos at my mother's house. This photo is unremarkable except that the wreath over the fireplace was made of computer punch cards (we always called them "IBM cards") with a bit of greenery and pine cones added to the center. My mother was always making stuff like this.

http://flickr.com/photos/bunchofpants/2603910/in/set-46794/

See also:

Easy! You take a "Holerith-code card" - (later IBM punch card), fold
over the corners of one end so it makes a "point" and fasten them (tape,
glue, whatever); turn it over so the fold is on the 'bottom' and staple
the square end to a piece of cardboard (or similar material). You fold
the next card, and staple it next to the first, on an angle, and repeat
around in a circle. This is the outside of the wreath. You continue
adding layers, alternating like shingles on a roof to the center. Spray
paint the whole thing gold, green, red, whatever, and add a little
greenery (bells, whatver) in the center and voila!


http://lists.techwr-l.com/pipermail/techwr-l/2005-December/001014.html

Here is a Fortran program now being used as a window shade. (I didn't know you could do that in Fortran).:

Jeff writes - "In some sense I'm using computer technology to both block out the sun and help me sleep in. With a box of old computer punch-cards, a used vertical blinds assembly, and some needle and thread I fashioned a device to help me in my ongoing battle against my bodies desire to wake-up.

We have where I work boxes upon boxes of these prehistoric paper punch-cards. I'm always looking for novel ideas to put them to good use again. Besides being good for blocking out the sun they also make good book marks and table leg stabilizer's... I think the cards I used were 'saved' Fortran programs.

 

[purina]

Thanks. I was looking for a picture of one, but couldn't find any. Mom liked to stick miniature christmas balls on the points of hers.

I also remember now that she made small xmas trees with them as well by stapling them to cardboard industrial sewing thread cones she got from the sewing shop at Chryslers.

 

[pausanias_usa]

If you REALLY wanted to piss off the guy loading the cards, write a program that kept doubling a sum to infinity <evil grin>.

But be sure to be out of the building before he realized!

 

[cityboy-stl]

Man...this is real programming: The IBM 407 Accounting machine! You punched cards for your data and you programmed the machine by hard-wiring the control boards. You'd have hundreds of these control boards all pre-wired for whatever report you wanted to print for the particular data in the cards. You had huge problems if one of the wires went bad, a whole print column would be blank or it wouldn't process some control break or other annoying thing would happen. This was real bare-metal programming. It was really a big PITA. This was pre-360 days. I did my first computer training doing this shit in high school in 1970. After that you punched programs in cards for input to the 370. Actually, even today I still do quite a bit of IBM Mainframe Assembly Language programming - no more friggen punch cards though LOL. I got pretty good with cards. I could just hold the card up to the light and read the EBCDIC code.

Anybody remember link-edit decks? If you wanted to change the program you could patch the object code in the link-edit deck then re-link your program and run. In those days it could take an hour or more just to compile a program but you could patch and link the object code pretty fast.

 

[mark1111]

^Thats what I was talking about by "program". The big board with the wires! You had to lock it in place in the back and the whole unit was huge.

 

[thermodynamics]

Can you believe that a few of us young-uns thought it would be "cool" to get one of these machines running again?

We're too young to know better.

 

[bhg08054]

A little anecdote:

You know how so many of us carry data around on little USB memory sticks? Well portable data isn't so new. Back when I was in college (c. 1979) I can recall the graduate Statistics majors used to carry their data around too. Only back then it was a stack of boxes of punch cards on hand truck.
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