Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2012/12/21
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]1970-71? Me too, but in my last year at (high) school, taking an elective course. The school had something like 30 minutes each month on the Imperial College mainframe in London, which involved gathering together the punched cards from the class, sending down to London by Royal Mail, receiving back the print out which was then split out to each user. I should clarify that the cards were pre-semi-punched, meaning that the user had to use a pin to push out the chads from each row/column by hand to code the desired character. It took a while to do one line of code, even after the time it took to learn the fundamentals of Fortran IV programming! And then it took a while to get the response back from the mainframe. By post. Two ways. (I guess that was half-duplex transmission!). I remember the impatient waiting for the print-out to come back, but my memory of reading it is very clear... XXX SYNTAX ERROR LINE 100 XXX The school later graduated to having its own ICL1900 (if memory serves) on site, long after I had left. Wouldn't have made any difference to my skill-level! Piers -----Original Message----- From: lug-bounces+piers.hemy=gmail.com at leica-users.org [mailto:lug-bounces+piers.hemy=gmail.com at leica-users.org] On Behalf Of FRANK DERNIE Sent: 21 December 2012 08:31 To: Leica Users Group Subject: Re: [Leica] Some artifacts at the Computer History Museum IMG: Hi Nathan, that -was- sadistic! I started writing software in 1970/71. All on punched cards. I also never dropped a stack, but I know people who did! Back then the university had 2 computers, an IBM 370 and a CDC 6600 IIRC, for the entire university. Mind you only engineers and other scientists used computers there. FD >________________________________ > From: Nathan Wajsman <photo at frozenlight.eu> >To: Leica Users Group <lug at leica-users.org> >Sent: Friday, 21 December 2012, 6:18 >Subject: Re: [Leica] Some artifacts at the Computer History Museum IMG: > >Fascinating! I had a sadistic computer science teacher in my first semester of university, in 1980, who made us punch cards because he wanted us experience how things were done when he was young...fortunately, I never had the experience of dropping the stack on the floor. > >Cheers, >Nathan > >Nathan Wajsman >Alicante, Spain >http://www.frozenlight.eu >http://www.greatpix.eu >PICTURE OF THE WEEK: http://www.fotocycle.dk/paws >Blog: http://nathansmusings.wordpress.com/ > > >YNWA > > > > >On Dec 21, 2012, at 6:55 AM, Herbert Kanner wrote: > >> Fellow LUGers, >> >> I have been a volunteer at the Computer History Museum since 2003, starting as a documenter of artifacts. That is, in collaboration with a partner, the partner often being a paid staff member, we would enter characteristics of the object in question into a horribly complex database. Things such as dimensions, weight (if it was small enough to be picked up), place of manufacture, etc., etc., including all numbers that could be found on the object: model numbers, serial numbers, goddam numbers, you name it. Then we would photograph it with a point & shoot. >> >> One of the tasks for which I eventually volunteered was editing those damn photographs. Considering how foolproof a P$S is, I was just amazed at how badly some of the volunteers would handle a camera. Many of the pix just had to be thrown out. >> >> After a couple of years of this, I thought it would be fun to become a docent. At the time, all that could be seen by visitors was in one large room, and the formal docent training was an hour in which they showed us where all the emergency exits from the building were. >> >> In 2012 a brand new $20 million exhibit opened ($15 having been contributed by Bill Gates) and some formal docent training ensued, led by a lady who had trained docents at two art museums: Getty and Cantor) >> >> I took a few pictures yesterday of museum artifacts. Not wanting to overwhelm people, I will post them two or three at a time, with a bit of explanation of what they are. The light in there is really weird, being a mixture of ordinary incandescent, window light, and deliberately colored light. Also, some, not today's, had to be shot at ISO 2600 (flash not permitted, and I've given it up anyway), so we'll see how good noise reduction is. >> >> For today: >> >> The Babbage Difference Engine #2. This is a working machine, and we demonstrate it once each day that the Museum is open. There are two of them in the world; the other is in the London Science Museum. We are the only ones who still demonstrate it regularly, as a result of which it requires regular maintenance with occasional major repairs. What the machine does is by addition only, it evaluates seventh degree polynomials to seven places of accuracy--such polynomials can be satisfactory approximations to other functions such as logarithms and trig functions. >> >> http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/herbk1/L1002678.jpg.html >> >> The U.S. Constitution requires a census every ten years. That word does not actually appear there; it's called "enumeration". The purpose is to establish how many Representatives a state is entitled to. In the Constitution a (white) person counted as one, a slave as 3/5 of a person, and a red-skin didn't count at all. Now Congress in it's wisdom decided that if these guys were out counting heads, they might as well ask a few useful questions. The resulting data, in 1880, took seven years to process. Because the population was growing, the most optimistic estimate was that it would take eleven years to process the data in 1890. Herman Hollerith proposed a method of dealing with the data by using punched cards, which by no coincidence turned out to be the same size and shape as the currency at the time. Here is the machine which read the cards. The card was put on a platform and the handle depressed. Wherever there was a hole, a pin would go through the hole and complete an e >le >> ctric circuit. The counters that you see are like clocks, which a large hand and a small one. Each clock could count up to ten thousand. >> >> http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/herbk1/L1002660.jpg.html >> >> Here is a crude device that was used to punch the cards, a pantograph. >> >> http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/herbk1/L1002662.jpg.html >> >> After Hollerith retired, some investors who had already bought a company that made time clock and a calculating grocery scale bought Hollerith's company. Eventually they hired as CEO a guy who had been fired by National Cash Register. That guy got rid of the clocks and scales and eventually renamed the company International Business Machines, later renamed IBM. His name was Thomas J. Watson. >> >> Enjoy, >> >> Herb >> >> >> Herbert Kanner >> kanner at acm.org >> 650-326-8204 >> >> Question authority and the authorities will question you. >> >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Leica Users Group. >> See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information >> > > >_______________________________________________ >Leica Users Group. >See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information > > > _______________________________________________ Leica Users Group. See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information