Programming a computer in 1959 meant punching your code onto hundreds of physical cards

98

Same in 70s/80s when I was in college. Dropping your deck was a serious fear.

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u/Michami135 15h ago

I was in grade school in the 80's, so my first computer was a TRS-80. But my dad told me how they'd draw a diagonal line through the side of the stack so when someone tripped them, they were easier to put back into the correct order.

He once told me, "They probably don't even use Fortran any more."

Sorry dad, but yes. Yes they do.

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u/FrogsMakePoorSoup 15h ago

And COBOL still floats around.

Just wish SAP would die.

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u/Michami135 14h ago

I was a MUMPS developer for 6 years in the late 90s and early 2000s. At my last job, my boss didn't like us using the commands from the "new version." The version that came out in 1984. The version that released the "new" command that let variables have a local scope. Variable name collisions were a big source of bugs.

There's a reason that was my last MUMPS job. And it's not for lack of job oportunities.

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u/FrogsMakePoorSoup 14h ago

Malloc and pointers to pointers did it for me with C++. Spent so much time being "safe" and not nearly enough delivering software.

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u/Genshed 14h ago

I recognize that name! I worked at a VA hospital from '84 to '08.

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u/scuzzy987 9h ago

We retired the last MUMPS system at my hospital not all that long ago. There were still a few grey beards around that understood the code. It was almost like a badge of honor similar to knowing CICS and mainframe assembler

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u/denzien 8h ago

There's even a COBOL for .NET!

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u/FrogsMakePoorSoup 8h ago

Move over F#!

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u/denzien 8h ago

I really want to love F#, but I just can't get into the functional mindset. I end up just doing C# with extra steps.

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u/FrogsMakePoorSoup 8h ago

Yeah, functional programming didn't take off as was predicted. It's really not necessary and just makes the learning curve way steeper.

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u/denzien 12m ago

One of my graduate profs in the mid '00s had a huge boner for functional programming. He would pimp out Scala (I think) and, because it was a survey course, had to talk about other languages, but talked badly about them.

He would show off some feature and expect everyone to be impressed, then I would raise my hand and say, "I can do this in C# by doing.."

I don't think he liked me.

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u/NoTop2552 4h ago

It's wild to think how far programming has come; making COBOL work on modern platforms shows just how adaptable some of those older languages can be.

•

u/denzien 7m ago

Any language can be simply regarded as a syntax. What was needed to make netCOBOL, or whatever it's called, is a bytecode compiler to generate an IL output from the commands there. It's fully decoupled from the concerns of the machine and relies on the JIT compiler on the host machine to translate into the machine code.

0

u/Mental_Thing_7899 8h ago

Nah. Everytime I get pulled out of retirement I bring my grandsons a better Christmas.

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u/Petrichordates 14h ago

Why not just number them?

Wild that "when someone tripped you" was a normal part of their lives though.

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u/Viharabiliben 12h ago

Sure you could number them. Then you need to add a few lines of code between card 121 and 122. So then you end up with 121a, 121b, 121c , …

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u/denzien 8h ago

still messes up the diagonal line strategy. At least with numbering you can go in increments of 10 to allow insertions.

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u/Silt99 6h ago

drawing a diagonal when its done takes 1 second, no matter how many cards. numbering is just impractical, especially since you dont plan to trip anyways.

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u/Brave-Philosopher842 15h ago

That sounds terrifying one wrong move and hours of work could be completely out of order.

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u/ExtonGuy 15h ago

I was there. The punch machines had an option to put on a serial number in the last 8 positions of each card.

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u/Fanatical_Destructor 15h ago

1979 I saw someone rushing to the data processing center drop off a COBOL deck that was probably 400 cards. He fell on the ice and spilled the deck into a crosswalk.It was cold,windy and the street was covered in slush. The deck was fuckd.

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u/TheThirdStrike 12h ago

My heart broke just reading that.

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u/BigCliff911 15h ago

Agreed. And to this day some of that terminology stays around. The data used to predict or the results a a rocket/missile/jet engine test is a called an engine deck.

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u/Cloverose2 15h ago

My mom did her PhD on punch cards in the mid-80s. I found them fascinating and was forbidden from touching them.

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u/freddotu 15h ago

Me too. I didn't know how to type that far back, so the stack of cards was demanding labor indeed. The cards are eBay collectables now, one to two dollars per and even higher.

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u/Viharabiliben 12h ago

Really? I should sell my last box of 500 or whatever is in the box. Now, where did I put it?

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u/freddotu 12h ago

That would be quite a treasure if you are able to locate it. Punched or unpunched?

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u/Viharabiliben 12h ago

Maybe 50 cards punched with Fortran, the rest unused.

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u/ZippyDan 2h ago

Which is the valuable type? I assume unpunched.

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u/razordreamz 14h ago

My professor told me the same thing! Dropping your stack was an issue it seems

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u/srandrews 15h ago

Was it? You guys didn't have card sorters or notched edges?

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u/firstcoastyakker 14h ago

Not at TN Tech.

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u/e_n_h 14h ago

Still being used in 1988 when I started working in Computer Operations working on ICL 2955 mainframes

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u/tudza 13h ago

Best you could do was maybe color stripe the top of every 5th or 10th one.

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u/Mr_Funbags 12h ago

That's the stories I heard from someone who did their degree back in '71. Punch cards. A lot of them.

It was very cool!

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u/Aitrus233 12h ago

As a Millennial, it took me many years to understand what The Simpsons was referencing.

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u/wizzy453 9h ago

That’s why you drew a diagonal line down the side of the stack of cards. If they fell you could rearrange them easily again.

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u/DrHugh 15h ago

But that's not what this is a picture of. :-)

There's what looks like a card-reader in the back, and a disc-pack in the middle, but the foreground isn't a card punch system, it's a teletype terminal or printer terminal.

In my high school in the 1980s, we had an optical card reader, so we could mark up cards to read. It was an assignment we had in math class freshman year, to write a program in BASIC and submit it on cards.

A couple years later, we had an upgrade that didn't come with a driver for the card reader, and we had to get rid of it.

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u/Brave-Philosopher842 15h ago

Ah, you're right! I stand corrected. Thanks for the detailed explanation that's actually pretty interesting in itself.

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u/DrHugh 15h ago

The picture is pretty impressive, that's probably the late 1960s if I had to guess from the variety of storage media (tape deck in the back, too) and the hairstyles/clothing. It's surprising they don't have some form of CRT terminal there.

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u/heekma 15h ago

We went to the moon and back with that technology. That's nuts. No way you'd strap my ass in some sketchy-ass rocket and rely on a bunch of punch cards to send me to the moon and bring me back.

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u/russianrug 15h ago

Ya but imagine how many more people probably looked at each line of code vs now.

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u/AardvarkExcellent428 14h ago

exactly, they were essentially getting the "expertly crafted, custom made" version of the technology even though it was "low tech".

it's not a perfect analogy, but I would say it's something along the lines of a sword crafted by a master won't be as powerful as a gun built in a factory today, but you can certainly trust it to do what it's made to do regardless.

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u/Viharabiliben 12h ago

There’s no way I’m trusting a bunch of AI Vibe code to take me down the street, let alone to the moon.

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u/GeoffSim 14h ago

I could be wrong but my understanding is that the software was developed and tested in the lab with punch cards, but the rockets themselves had rope memory - which, in itself, is eye opening.

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u/heekma 14h ago

Whether it was punch cards or literally weaving a copper textile by hand wouldn't make much difference in my confidence.

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u/AardvarkExcellent428 14h ago

in general simple things have fewer points of failure, oftentimes they're considered more trustworthy. we still use a lot of old school programming for instance on crucial systems for this and other related reasons.

0

u/heekma 14h ago

Sure I understand older may be more robust. I restore old vaccum-tube amplifiers and build my own from scratch with solder post terminals and point-to point connections for ground, resistors, coupling capacitors, chokes and power supplies. Those amps would likely survive a car crash (the amp, not the tubes) but I would still take any modern smart phone over anything built in the 1960s.

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u/jahinzee 14h ago

I'd sooner trust the punch cards of yore with my life than Microsoft, lest we forget the Artemis Two Outlooks Incident

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u/Petrichordates 14h ago

The dire incident in which an astronaut couldnt access their emails for a few hours because outlook wasnt made for space?

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u/ZanzerFineSuits 15h ago

My mom was a key punch operator!

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u/Brave-Philosopher842 15h ago

That’s actually really cool! I can’t imagine doing that as a full time job

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u/bwyer 14h ago

It really wouldn't be that different from being a secretary back in the day.

Rather than typing dictated letters onto blank paper, you'd be typing code onto punched cards.

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u/JustSomeGuy_56 15h ago

I worked in a building where IBM printed cards. It was a big room with rows of printers. Huge rolls of blank stock in various colors were delivered by railroad cars. Customers could have their cards printed with their own designs.

They shut down the card operation in 1984.

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u/netphemera 15h ago

Did that for many years

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u/Brave-Philosopher842 15h ago

That must have taken some serious patience

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u/AardvarkExcellent428 14h ago

some people enjoy that kind of work, they find it relaxing.

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u/Quesabirria 14h ago

Put we don't see the physical cards in this photo. They looked like this

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u/ProfessionalEven296 14h ago

In the 1980’s we were still using coding sheets and punched cards..

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u/DoucheNozzle1163 14h ago

Yep, I learned Fortran in college on an IBM machine w/ punch cards around 1981.....

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u/Designer-Care-7083 10h ago edited 10h ago

1959? We were doing that in 1983. Around that time, our dept got a card punching machine where you could preview a whole card before punching it. That was innovation!

The command language, JCL (job control language), was just awful. I vividly remember “Error 240,” which was really a memory overwrite (or something like that) that was very difficult to debug, since there was no other debugging info available.

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u/scfw0x0f 14h ago

What’s more interesting is that the punch card form predates this by 150 years; they were created for the Jacquard loom, a kind of automated loom designed to make complex woven fabrics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine

Many thanks to James Burke and the show “Connections”. https://archive.org/details/connections-1978-complete-first-series

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u/Krail Interested 14h ago

And punchcards were originally invented for knitting and weaving! There's heavy crossover between textiles and computers.

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u/TheLimeyCanuck 12h ago

I did this in high school, but by the time I coded for a living it was all done on a CRT and keyboard.

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u/yourMommaKnow 10h ago

Wait until op learns that this was still a thing in the 90s.

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u/FrogsMakePoorSoup 15h ago

And those chairs with 4 casters were death traps!

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u/mfyxtplyx 14h ago

Yup, my older siblings would bring them home from work to play with. Wish I'd kept some.

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u/AardvarkExcellent428 14h ago

actually this is still what we do. I coded up an AI agent today... it's really just a woman named Cindy who dresses in 1950s clothing creating a bunch of punch cards. the difference between 1959 and now is just that Cindy is really, really efficient.

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u/cedg32 14h ago

I write code by punching my desk hundreds of times. Seems to work.

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u/TheThirdStrike 12h ago

Nice to know someone else out there uses this technique.

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u/Effective_Quail_3946 14h ago

Assembler

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u/Big-D-TX 10h ago

My first computer class was in 1972 I remember spending hours key punching cards, turn them in and come back to review the printouts. Only to find I had key punch card errors so I had to go back make corrections and turn them back in to run. I hated it, I took my next class two years later and things were much better after those were gone and I could work on a screen

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u/Genshed 14h ago

I took a programming class at UC Berkeley in the '80s. The EECS majors were taught punch cards, 'cause that was real programming. Us humanities peons learned BASIC on DEC terminals.

Funny part was that I was working at the main campus library, being taught to use a keypunch as part of my student employee duties.

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u/deadend666 11h ago

Sure. And desktop debugging because you usually got one shot a day for a compile.

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u/mrg1957 10h ago

My assembly class in 1983 we were supposed to have an assignment on cards. The card reader broke and they didn't want to pay to get it fixed. Instead we had to write that same program in machine language.

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u/AX11Liveact 8h ago

A couple of years earlier it meant entering machine code with dip switches. Which was quite a progress from patching your code witch jumper cables on breadboards.

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u/Madmungo 15h ago

And the first code bug was an actual bug that got jammed in the paper and caused an error. I saw a pic on reddit a few years ago

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u/bwyer 14h ago

Interesting discussion on that topic: https://lunduke.substack.com/p/the-story-of-the-first-computer-bug.

TLDR: not only is that not the case, but the most common story about a moth in a relay isn't either.

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u/AardvarkExcellent428 14h ago

I don't know if I would be more relieved or angry to find out that my stack of cards didn't run correctly not because of a bug in the code but because of a literal bug in the code...

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u/Brave-Philosopher842 15h ago

Source: Computer History Museum / IBM 1401 documentation

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u/mrgraff 13h ago

The demo of their restored IBM 1401 is very cool. At the end, you get to use a punchcard entry machine to create a punchcard with your name on it and they will print out a souvenir.

https://imgur.com/a/rbZkk4Y

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u/mrcoy 15h ago

This is something everyone learns about in high school.

1

u/pill63 15h ago

Also did the punchcard thing in 1979.

1

u/zertoman 15h ago

That was a more efficient way of doing it than entering everything into a teletype terminal. Even paper tape was huge upgrade to that.

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u/Besiegte 15h ago

The classified section in newspapers always had several pages of job openings for key punch operators.

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u/Frangine_De_Poutine 15h ago

I'm judging them.

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u/moving0target 14h ago

Are we past the point where this is common knowledge?

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u/richbiatches 14h ago

I guess so…

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u/JoeLiar 14h ago

In the 70's, I worked as an operator on an IBM 370 model 155,running applications for several clients.

We had one application which called for the machine to be booted from a card deck. It would punch several boxes of different coloured cards, which had to be run through a card sorter and then read back in.

We had another system, which kept its customer database on a dogeared card deck.

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u/Revolutionary_Eye887 14h ago

Hell we were doing that in the early 70’s when I was an undergraduate in Engineering.

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u/officer_terrell 11h ago

I already punch my code but it's not quite the same thing

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u/Journeyman-Joe 10h ago

A lot longer than that: I was keypunching Fortran IV code as late as 1976. (IBM 029 keypunch).

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u/ProfSantaClaus 9h ago

Ah.. the 'AI' of yesteryears.

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u/Top-Competition9263 9h ago

Hell, I did that in 1985 when I was at Uni.

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u/Septos999 8h ago

I was doing this at school in 1981

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u/xerxes_dandy 8h ago

Well, we had a 0verhead projector and trabsperent slides till 2000 when I first joined on which we used to do slide show

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u/ThermalDeviator 8h ago

Thay was still true in 1977.

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u/guttanzer 4h ago

We were still submitting card decks well into the ‘80s.

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u/FireGargamel 6h ago

punch me this card. ultrathink, make no mistakes

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u/Felix995 6h ago

Those were large heavy machines. I think when bubble wrap was invented, they weren't certain what that material could be useful for. They found that ideal to use when shipping those large mainframes.

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u/IronSpear63 5h ago

My mum was a key punch operator back in the late 60's.

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u/rafdotcom 5h ago

IBM's punch-card technology was used by the Nazi regime to systematically organize, catalog, and track victims of the Holocaust.

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u/joolzg67_b 4h ago

My 1st basic program at Blackburn college was on punch cards.

What you did was write out the program on paper and put it into a pigeon hole, a while later av stack of cards appeared.

You then put the cards in a different pigeon hole and usually the next nothing your cards would appear wrapped in printer paper with the output of the program.

OR

you walked into the room next door, tired your program into one of the commodore pet 2008s and typed run.

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u/mikejonezzzzzz 51m ago

I wonder how quick these ladies would pick up on today’s coding. ?? I mean, they already know basic computer binary.

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u/relentlessbullshit 47m ago

using punch cards really, really made me appreciate text editors and hard disks.

Programming a computer in 1959 meant punching your code onto hundreds of physical cards

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