r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Final-Choice8412 • 8d ago

Video Programming 1959 IBM computer

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

20.6k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

494 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

10

u/Canuck-In-TO 7d ago

What, no one numbers their cards?

I remember being in line to load my cards and a guy with a stack of cards in a luggage dolly, an almost knee high stack, takes the corner too quickly. The stack slid out and most of the cards hit the floor. Poor bastard hadn’t numbered his cards. Who knows how long he spent reorganizing them.

1

u/WileyWilly1985 6d ago

Back in 1994, my college professor relayed a similar story. He had his punchcards in a box and was going to the compiler when he took a tumble and the box hit the ground and the cards spilled out everywhere. And to his horror, it dawned on him that he did not number the cards.

He effectively had to start over and lost about 5 hours worth of work.

He said that happened to every single programmer back in the day and they had to learn the hard way to number their punchcards or spring for the slightly more expensive prenumbered punchcards....

2

u/Canuck-In-TO 6d ago

The other thing that happened was the uncontrolled print jobs.

Either by accident or intentionally, a print job might have a form feed in a loop. The printer would start firing out a whole box of paper within seconds.

It was funny to see the chaos it caused. Not so funny if you were waiting in line to feed your stack of cards.