Retired programmer playing with ubuntu

Introductions
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Call me Tom. I live on the outskirts of Atlanta Ga.

I was born in 1950, which makes me 75 as I type here. I was a programmer. I started on main frames when there was no such thing as a home computer. I retired about 2010 and started playing with ubuntu about 2015. I’ve got some cognitive decline. memory loss and so on. Nothing abnormal for my age, but I do sometimes ask dumb questions or ask the same question twice because I didn’t remember asking it the first time. Please bear with me. If you are lucky you will be 75 some day and find yourself asking younger sharper minds for assistance.

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I bet you have some fun stories to tell from the early days of your career! Maybe not quite blinking lights and punch cards, but probably not too far removed from it.

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Welcome to Ubuntu Discourse :slight_smile:

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My first job was at the NCR Data center here in Atlanta. We did use punch cards. Programmers would write all their code on paper forms, then give those the to the punch card ladies (Yes, all the punch card punchers were women and all the programmers were men). For quick fixes we would make our own cards.

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I have two questions.

One is kind of a general one I never really understood: how is the program represented on those cards?

The second one is a little more particular to you: what were you developing at NCR? They were responsible for several interesting innovations.

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Each punched card had 80 columns 12 rows each. Each column represented 1 character so each card contained 80 chars. I used punched cards to write programs in assembler language on an IBM mainframe 360/40 with a ferrite core RAM memory of 128KB … yes KiloBites!

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Fortran on the cards used the first 5 cols for optional line numbers, the 6th col was a continuation flag for long instructions that couldn’t fit on one card, the last 8 cols were unused, unless you wanted to sequentially number the cards in the deck so if a tired computer operator dropped the deck you could resort the whole thing.

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Anyone capable of giving me hello world in FORTRAN on a punch card?

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Anybody remember splicing mylar tape to edit and run programs?

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Hello and welcome, sounds like an interesting life.

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Apparently three cards were needed … one for each line of code … https://www.quora.com/Back-in-the-punched-card-era-did-people-write-Hello-World-programs

But then I used paper and mylar tape or even a console … line by line. No experience in punched cards. Creating chads like confetti.

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According to that, each line of the program was encoded on a single card. Sheesh.

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The then-current challenge was to write a FORTRAN program whose output was itself. Any sensible person dealing with the language in those days got a copy of Software Tools, Kernigan&Plauger and wrote a Ratfor preprocessor – getting some block structuring years before the FORTRAN standard got them.

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Welcome Tom. I hope you enjoy this welcoming community. Looking forward to hearing more about this amazing life.

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paper tape… chads all over the place, noisy teletypes… Star Trek programs that would leverage these noises… :blush: yes, I remember. It’s baked in.

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Welcome Tom! Glad you are here.

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Each punched card had 80 columns

It’s no coincidence that the standard size of everything from CRT dumb terminals (e.g. VT100s) to the console/terminal window on your PC is 80 characters wide. These original decisions are so ingrained in the DNA of “modern” IT that it mostly goes unnoticed.

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