2006SEP201344

'... Things had changed a bit from my undergraduate years. Gone the mainframes, punch cards, deck writers. It was light years away from doing mainframe (similar to this one) , batch card (info for purposes of understanding how batch works only) processing in Fortran, editing mainframe text files in Ed and writing desktop GIS graphical and console applications in pascal during undergrad. ...' [0]

 

Punchcards

Trying out some new hardware. So I scanned a Job card from my computing past. It's a punchcard with map data believe it or not. We used to sit on the deckwriter and manually punch in the co-ordinates for contour lines.

 

I can't find the cards I used to program Fortran. The programs where simple calculations forget exactly more than likely map projections and plotting, well suited to Fortran. I've written about this previously, here I think.

 

The thing is you could carry you programs around in a deck with a rubber band. Great stuff. Don't miss it a bit :)

 

Reference

[0] slashdot.org/~goon/journal, '10 years on the Internet, Early Internet - what information can I find?'

slashdot.org/~goon/journal/62860

[Accessed Wednesday, 20 September 2006]

Done