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Comment by kens | Hacker News Reader

People complaining about punch cards? I started programming with optical mark cards which were much, much worse. I'd fill in bubbles on each card to make the program, mail the program to the Waterloo computer center, and get my output back in a week or so. After fixing the errors (either the bubble wasn't dark enough or a coding error), I'd send the program back. It took me weeks to get my first program to run. Compared to that, punch cards were like living in the future.

By the way, if you want to experience punch cards in person, come to the Computer History Museum (Mountain View, CA) on Wednesdays or Saturdays for demos of the IBM 1401 and the opportunity to punch your own cards. You can also see a high-speed card sorter in action.

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Ah my dad has the same story about his time in the Math and Computer building at UW. Though he said it got a lot better in later years when he could just show up at 4am and run things pretty much right away because nobody wanted to be there at 4am. That part I find hard to believe based on my time at UW.

When you talk about the MC building at UW, you have to mention the Red Room. see https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/40th/images/img039.jpg and https://ist.uwaterloo.ca/cs/redroom/

The central core of the first floor of the building was for the mainframes and supporting gear in the Red Room. The second floor had windows which let people look down on the mainframes and the priests tending the electronic behemoths.

the Red Room definitely had a Stanley Kubrick The Shining vibe to it.

> fill in bubbles

Sounds like scan-tron testing, don’t forget your #2 pencil!

Probably an HB pencil - Commonwealth countries tended to use a different hardness measure for pencils than the US. I think Waterloo is a Canadian university.

Am Canadian, never heard of a #2 pencil but very much had HB pencils

Woah, TIL that HB was not a branding mark on the #2 pencils I used growing up!

HB is the middle of the scale. From there it's going both ways. Hs are harder and Bs are softer. There's also an F thrown into that scale for extra confusion.

https://pencils.com/pages/hb-graphite-grading-scale

I just love these ancient programming war stories!

There was a very LARGE sign on the printer 'DO NOT PUT YOUR CARDS ON THE PRINTER' and once a day, someone would put their cards on the printer, it would run out of paper, and automatically open up for more paper... scattering the cards to the wind. I would only spend one day punching a week, so as to avoid saying..."You have a printout... just start sorting by hand, and then put a red mark diagonally down the top... My father used cards too, and his decks became Christmas trees.

My dad told me you were supposed to make a diagonal line across your cards with a magic marker incase that happened so you could put them back together.

My first year in college was the first year they didn't use punched cards at my college.

> come to the Computer History Museum (Mountain View, CA) on Wednesdays or Saturdays for demos of the IBM 1401 and the opportunity to punch your own cards

My wife and I went to the museum yesterday and indeed got to punch our own cards! It was a super cool experience, thanks for recommending it!

From the moderator at OEIS [Incidentally, today these cards are sometimes referred to as "punch cards" (sic). This is wrong, they were always called "punched cards". Anyone who says "punch cards" is showing they know nothing about the subject. Saying "punch cards" is like saying "hike boots" or "walk stick" or "chew gum".]

I will apologize for speaking of them as "punch cards" to the first person who shows up with a black eye caused by a blow from a "punching bag".

Penciling cards? How about straight binary input through frontpanel switches?

My first PC - a Heathkit H8 - had a numeric keypad that could be used for loading RAM contents with a program and starting execution at some address. I don't recall if it was decimal, hex or octal but it was a lot more convenient than the IMSAI at school that had a bank of paddles to set 1/0 to load into memory.

But my first encounter with computers was Fortran on an IBM fed with punch cards. Very unforgiving. No backspace. And local jerks would slip already punched cards into the feed hopper so those had to be checked before punching any cards. And the error messages were absolutely opaque.

> I don't recall if it was decimal, hex or octal

Worse - it was split octal. "the memory location after 000.377 was 001.000." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_octal

But yeah, better than toggle switches.

In the snow, too.

Uphill in both directions.

My father — now in his 80s — claimed he had to walk "uphill, both ways, to school" in front of my grandfather; my grandfather quipped: "there was a whole hill between the house and the school: I kept telling you boys to go around it!"

To be fair, this is possible. My school was on the other side of a fairly steep valley and each way if I went by bike the ride involved an exhilarating initial descent and then an exhausting uphil slog.

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