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Comment by NoRelToEmber | Hacker News Reader

> I saw on more than one occasion grown men brought to tears because they dropped a box of cards scattering them across the floor and they would have to spend many hours sorting them.

I realize I may be a bit late with this suggestion, but why not number the cards, like the pages of a book?

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Cards were often numbered for finished programs, but during development any change or refactoring would invalidate the numbers and the diagonal lines drawn on the side of a deck of cards. Some of the larger comp centers had data processing equipment that would number a stack of cards by punching the card number in the reserved columns 73-80. Card sorters could then sort a mixed up deck using a radix sort in a few passes. See my nearby comments.

I thought everyone quickly learned to draw a diagonal like across the top with a marker. That helps get things approximately where they need to be.

At least that's what I heard from the older professors at my university.

The diagonal sharpie was taught to me day 1 by my prof at the time. FWIW.

It's analogous to backups Everyone is thaught these are important to do, and it isn't realy much work, but the times i've seen students lose weeks of thesis work because of storage crash ...

They were normally numbered.

However that means that it was possible to sort them, not that it was possible to sort them (manually) in a short time.

Since a card was a program text line, there were frequently many thousand cards in a program and the smallest programs had a few hundreds.

And that's why every poor sod in CS have to learn sorting :)

Back when I was employed as an office peon for a summer myself and a few interns were tasked with alphabetizing about a thousand file folders.

Fresh from my algorithms course, I organized a parallel meat space merge sort. And it went pretty quickly.

Everyone started with very small random stacks to order, and then merging the pre sorted stacks was relatively quick mindless work.

This is a great example of Computer Science is not about Computers.

“concurrent meatspace mergesort”

I like it

There's an alternative steampunk future where punch cards continued to be the programming medium of choice, and DX is all about better managing the sorting, organization, and secure carriage of punch cards to the supercomputer lab. Yes, a separate lab. After all, for sufficient sizes of data, sneakernet is more efficient than network cables anyway.

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