• (cs) in reply to Joe
    Joe:
    You all make me feel so OLD! I used to program in punch cards back in the 70's. Happy was the day when we could put sequence numbers on the cards. Before then, should you drop your deck, you had a bit of a problem on your hands.
    There was a trick: you just draw a thin line diagonally down the side of the deck - you'd be surprised how easy it is to spot a card out of sequence if you use a sharp pencil/pen.
  • none (unregistered) in reply to anon

    If universities were run by business people, all of these problems would be solved, and for much cheaper.

  • (cs) in reply to Steve
    Steve:
    Regarding lecture halls, not all courses are taught in lecture halls and even so, there are only so many to go around. Since the taxpayers (in state funded institutions) are often loath (for very good reasons) to vote large construction bond issues or otherwise pay what it takes to provide indefinitely expandable facilities, there will always be limits to available facilities (if you ever want to see an acrimonious battle, try academic "space wars" -- in our building there is one professor who hasn't spoken a word to another professor for close to 20 years because of conflicts over space).

    At my university we had CS classes taught in trailers because there wasn't enough room in proper classrooms, though I never had the pleasure of attending one. I did get to take a CS class in the Agricultural Engineering building, in a lecture hall next to a room marked "Gypsy Moth Research".

  • (cs) in reply to Lord Parity, Last Count of Register
    Lord Parity:
    ...In the middle sixty columns I punched "so cancel my membership already".
    We used to do that with plain old paper clips, randomly across the card. It ALWAYS got you a phone call from whatever company you sent the card to.

    I wish we could figure out a way to do that with automated attendants...

  • (cs) in reply to danixdefcon5
    danixdefcon5:
    real_aardvark:
    This is a university, goddamnit. Students signing up to courses is good. Several of them won't turn up, but that's a problem for the adminstrators, not for you.
    Try telling that to my university. Sometimes their system would bork up courses so that it was impossible to fill up my required course list; or some of them would show "closed - maximum student count reached" or something. To give them some credit, though, they did try to open up more slots as said courses overflowed. Problem was when you just had to take a course that had few students enrolled, that was harder to get.

    Oh well, that system had a whole boatload of WTFs in itself, it might be even worthy of a main article.

    I don't know why, but it seems to me that we're short on college WTF s around here. We've had a few, but no doozies as yet that I can remember.

    Make us happy. Submit them; after you graduate?

    danixdefcon5:
    Oh dude, you just brought my worst nightmares back
    On the other hand, don't call me that.

    I've paid my dudes.

  • ajp (unregistered) in reply to Bappi

    If you explain it to me, i'll get off your lawn. I promise.

  • (cs) in reply to none
    none:
    If universities were run by business people, all of these problems would be solved, and for much cheaper.
    You miss the blindingly obvious fact that "universities" (with or without a capital 'U', and with or without the nitwit mis-spelling as "colleges") are already run by "business" "people."

    Technically, they're run by bursars, accountants, and people who belong to a group name beginning with 'a' that I forget right now but which blighted my father's life.

    "You want to marry a moslem girl? OK, boy, go ahead."

    "You want to marry a small furry six-footed animal that may or may not have come from outer space? OK, boy, go ahead."

    "You want to marry one of those (expand 'a' here) fuck-wits? Are you MAD?"

    And that's before he asked the rest of the faculty.

    I suspect, sir, that you are an ignorant and prejudiced nincompoop.

  • Argent (unregistered)

    I have about 10,000 punch cards left. They make great memo cards.

    And in case I actually need them... I have a manually operated card punch in the closet. Looks like this:

    http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/misc/h/w2600.jpg

  • Liam Clark (unregistered) in reply to Someone You Know
    Someone You Know:
    On the first day of each registration period SPIRE would usually crash for a while due to the sudden volume of requests. The same would occur on the first day of each semester's actual classes, when everyone would log on to SPIRE to find out which buildings their courses were in. The interface also had all manner of usability problems, not the least of which was that using your browser's back button while searching for a course would usually break the system to the point that you'd have to log out and log in again to get anything to work.

    On the bright side, SPIRE doesn't go down at inconvenient times anymore, and the back button is only useless now instead of harmful, but it's still PeopleSoft. Be glad you're not here for our new housing assignment system. They assign you a 90 minute window in which you can choose your room, and they don't take into account whether you have class during that window.

  • Breck Carter (unregistered)

    80-column punch cards made the best paper airplanes, positively lethal when folded to a point and fired via elastic bands.

    And the sharp-cornered chad made the best confetti, almost impossible to remove from hair, shag rugs (the 1970s, remember), etcetera.

  • Fiftyville (unregistered)

    Being an impoverished student in the 70's, I used punch cards from my Fortran class as Christmas cards one year, with envelopes "liberated" from the registrar's office.

    The card read "MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM MY NAME - YOU OWE $XX.XX" with a random number at the end.

    Surprisingly, a few relatives with a sense of humor actually did send some cash. My dad, however, sent me a birthday punch card later from his office with "HAPPY BIRTHDAY - COLLEGE TUITION PAID SO FAR: $XXXX.XX" with the full amount on the card.

  • LH (unregistered)

    Our uni has a nice system. It's called "allow everyvody to register". Though it occasionally leads to situations, when everybody's taken by surprise, and they end up having 500 people in a lecture hall designed for 300. But that isn't really a problem as the average attendence of lectures is about 50% of those who pass the course.

  • W. Snapper (unregistered) in reply to Bappi
    Let's see how many young whippersnappers get that.
    I may be not be so old, but I honestly can't recall having ever snapped a whip (or a whipper).
  • Don McArthur (unregistered) in reply to Bappi

    Do you remember the flat brass rod you could use to run through a stack of cards to manually find the ones that weren't punched in a particular position?

  • iToad (unregistered) in reply to Joe
    Joe:
    You all make me feel so OLD! I used to program in punch cards back in the 70's. Happy was the day when we could put sequence numbers on the cards. Before then, should you drop your deck, you had a bit of a problem on your hands.

    Back in the day, really large punched card decks were kept in card trays. You passed the tray in through the computer room window, and after your job was run, the operator put the tray and any printed output on a table in the card punch room. Before the victim came back to pick up his job, you replaced his card tray (sometimes containing 1000+ cards) with a tray filled with randomly oriented junk cards, and attached a note that said "Sorry, The operator dropped your deck". Back then, this sort of thing was considered greatly hilarious.

  • ping floyd (unregistered) in reply to The real wtf fool
    The real wtf fool:
    Otter:
    Presumably there was an assumption that only an insignificant number of dishonest people would cheat the system, and that added security wasn't warranted. That seems to have been correct, since classes weren't overflowing.

    I'm not seeing a WTF here, just a complete obliviousness to honor by both Robert and Alex.

    I'm seeing a complete obliviousness to student needs by universities. Only running a popular class once a year. Not providing lecture theatres large enough to accomodate popular courses. WTF?

    I don't think it's that uncommon. It usually happens with courses for uppperclassmen in a less popular major. There were two courses I needed to graduate - one was only offered in the Spring semester of odd numbered years and the other in the Spring semester of even numbered years! If you didn't plan your schedule right and get all your prerequisites, you were there for quite a while!

  • Frunobulax (unregistered) in reply to ping floyd

    "Do not fold, spindle or mutilate those unbelievers from a neighboring state." Name the song and artist and win a free cheeseburger in a can!

    Captcha: jumentum... Umm... what a kosher person gathers as he/she rolls down a hill?

  • hexatron (unregistered)
    _____________________________________________ / 02142 | / | | | |00█0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000| |1111█11111111111111111111111111111111111111111| |222█22█222222222222222222222222222222222222222| |3333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333| |44444█4444444444444444444444444444444444444444| |5555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555| |6666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666| |7777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777| |8888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888| |9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999| ----------------------------------------------- Been that. Done there.
  • (cs) in reply to anon
    anon:
    real_aardvark:
    Borrowing from my father's knowledge as an admissions tutor, there is no such thing as "the maximum students allowed." There never has been.

    What, you're going to deny them the right to stand at the back and do a Mexican Wave every time Dijkstra's name is mentioned?

    This is a university, goddamnit. Students signing up to courses is good. Several of them won't turn up, but that's a problem for the adminstrators, not for you.

    Fire code violations aside, having more students means you need: -More TAs to grade exams/problem sets -More TAs to lead discussion sessions, if class has any -More TAs for TA hours to answer student questions -More difficult for students to become engaged in the class or ask questions. -More difficult for students to learn because they’re stuck standing in the back instead of having a desk (ie: god help you if you’re not 20 minutes early). -More administrative/logistic effort to manage all the students/TAs -More difficult for the professor to directly interact with students.

    Most of the students being added to the course would be "poached" from other courses in the same department, so the accounting wouldn't be too much of a problem, since the TAs would come from the same pool of postgrads. The main problem is going to be labs, since running an extra tute simply means finding an extra postgrad and an empty room, the extra funds being provided to the department as a result of the extra enrolment.

  • hexatron (unregistered)

    ██_____________________________________________ █/█02142██████████████████████████████ | /████████████████████████████████████ | |████████████████████████████████████ | |00█0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 | |1111█11111111111111111111111111111111111111111 | |222█22█222222222222222222222222222222222222222| |3333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333 | |44444█4444444444444444444444444444444444444444| |5555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555 | |6666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666 | |7777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777 | |8888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888 | |9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 |

    Let's try that again.

  • hexatron (unregistered)

    ██_____________________________________________ █/█02142██████████████████████████████ | /████████████████████████████████████ | |████████████████████████████████████ | |00█0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 | |1111█11111111111111111111111111111111111111111 | |222█22█222222222222222222222222222222222222222| |3333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333 | |44444█4444444444444444444444444444444444444444| |5555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555 | |6666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666 | |7777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777 | |8888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888 | |9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 |

    Whoops! I left out the colored stripe.

  • LEGO (unregistered) in reply to matt
    matt:
    Charles:
    Our high school class used punch cards for attendance. There was a rack of slots near the teacher's desk with punch cards. For each absent student, she would go to the rack, remove the card that corresponded to the student, and submit it to administration.

    Our hack? To intercept the runner on the way to admin and have the card removed. The runner was another student. It required a bribe and a runner that was willing to be bribed.

    Being a runner was a lucrative job.

    You will tell me where Sanctuary is.

    Don't anger the sandman. Go to carousel and be renewed!

    -Logan.

  • (cs) in reply to Joe
    Joe:
    You all make me feel so OLD! I used to program in punch cards back in the 70's. Happy was the day when we could put sequence numbers on the cards. Before then, should you drop your deck, you had a bit of a problem on your hands.

    yeah, I remember when they invented the pencil...

  • (cs) in reply to Breck Carter

    Thank GOD I was born in the age of barcodes.

  • Kensey (unregistered) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    Lord Parity:
    ...In the middle sixty columns I punched "so cancel my membership already".
    We used to do that with plain old paper clips, randomly across the card. It ALWAYS got you a phone call from whatever company you sent the card to.

    I wish we could figure out a way to do that with automated attendants...

    You can, actually. Swear into the phone. Many of those systems are programmed to drop out of the IVR menus and transfer you straight to a human on detecting any of a number of swear words.

  • Mike L (unregistered)

    Let's not forget the punch card telephone...

    http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2007/09/04/retro-selectro-card.html

  • Chris (unregistered) in reply to OBloodyhell

    I'm about that old too. I remember our college having washing machine size disk drives, with 12 platters and read arms. Each allowing 10MB of storage!

    The computer they were attached was a Primos system. Funny thing, it allowed direct control of the read arms via assembly. That meant you could move every single read arm from one side to another (made a little bit of a whang! sound). It didn't take a couple of us long to realize that you could time those movements to set up a vibration which would move the entire washing machine.

    And that led to... you guessed it... DISK DRIVE races.

    I can't imagine how much life we took off those drives over the course of our 2 years of access :-)

  • Old fart (unregistered)

    I studied CS around the same time, too. Submitted jobs for homework assignments by loading a stack of punched cards in the card reader and waiting for the impact printer to print the results on the green-bar continuous form paper.

    We would set up a Fortran job to print a row of 132 dashes across the page in a loop with about a thousand iterations without advancing the printer. This would effectively perforate the page.

    The second loop would run another thousand iterations and eject a new page on the continuous green-bar paper. Of course, the printer couldn't spit the pages out because the continuous feed was by now bifurcated, and they would eventually jam inside the printer cover.

    Entertainment was so simple in those days... sighhh....

  • jmspeex (unregistered) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    I wish we could figure out a way to do that with automated attendants...

    It's sort of possible on my (not all) systems. For DTMF-bases systems, sometimes hitting zero continuously will work. For voice-based system, the trick is to say something that is obviously out-of-vocabulary in the current context. Especially effective is saying something silly (and preferably long) when prompted for a yes/no answer.

  • (cs) in reply to Bappi
    Bappi:
    "Q: How do you bury an old programmer? A: Face down, nine edge first."

    Let's see how many young whippersnappers get that.

    http://www.fivegulf.com/misc/LastBug.html

  • Fnord Prefect (unregistered) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    Joe:
    You all make me feel so OLD! I used to program in punch cards back in the 70's. Happy was the day when we could put sequence numbers on the cards. Before then, should you drop your deck, you had a bit of a problem on your hands.
    There was a trick: you just draw a thin line diagonally down the side of the deck - you'd be surprised how easy it is to spot a card out of sequence if you use a sharp pencil/pen.
    I remember reading about one system that let you put two instructions on each card. Thus, you could avoid the whole 'dropped deck' issue by having the second instruction on each card being a jump to the next card. Just label the first and last cards, and away you go!
  • Dennis (unregistered) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    We used to do that with plain old paper clips, randomly across the card. It ALWAYS got you a phone call from whatever company you sent the card to.

    I wish we could figure out a way to do that with automated attendants...

    When you say "paper clips" - would that be what we, around here anyway, call "staples"?

  • (cs)
    Bappi:
    "Q: How do you bury an old programmer? A: Face down, nine edge first." Let's see how many young whippersnappers get that.

    <Raises hand> I was born as punch cards started to die off, but I still know what that's about.

    JT Romella:
    My first computer was a Commodore Vic20 in the early 80s. Still have it to this day and fire it up once and a while.

    First computer I used was a VIC 20 owned by a relative. My dad bought a C64 a little after that. Still have both. VIC 20 still works, but the C64 is dead from memory.

  • C (unregistered) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    I wish we could figure out a way to do that with automated attendants...

    Actually I like some automated attendants. We have them in our parking garages at work. They're polite, friendly, have a great personality, and they don't glare at you for interrupting their TV watching when you ask to pay your way out.

    The problem are the ones in the grocery stores. There I'm the one doing all of the checking and sacking, but still paying full price.

  • Jay (unregistered)

    Ah, the good old days.

    I remember the first memory expansion I ever bought for a home computer. It was 16k and cost me $120. So that's a little over $7 per kilobyte. At that rate, let's see, the computer I'm typing on right now has 1.25 GB of RAM, the memory alone must be worth 8.75 million dollars!

  • Jay (unregistered)

    http://www.cardamation.com/page4.html

    They are selling card punch machines. Compatible with Windows XP!

    Apparently, somewhere out there, there are people who are still using punch cards. Probably to record sales of their 8-track tapes and vacuum tubes.

    Pass the word: Paper tape is coming back.

  • (cs)

    Now be fair. I designed and built just such a punched card registration system in 1970/71 for a newly created college in Canada (we were the proud owners of our very own IBM 29 key punch but had to use another college's computer).

    As described, the available places (plus 10%) were pre-punched. All students were registered and their timetables (snail) mailed out in under 24 hours – including the time to drive the boxes of cards from the various campuses across town to the other college's computer centre.

    At the end of each term we provided pre-punched cards (each with a student's name on it) to the academics to write on in felt-tipped pen. When we received them back, they went through the pre-programmed card punch – 1 keystroke per card. The results were sent out within 24 hours of receiving them from the academics.

    It's over 35 years later and I don't know of any college these days that meets that sort of timetable.

    And no – those were much simpler days and the idea that a student might "cheat the system" never occurred to me (I'm much more cynical these days :-)

  • Dark (unregistered) in reply to Outlaw Programmer
    Outlaw Programmer:
    It's comforting to know that even in the 1970's, course schedule systems were a complete mess. WTF is it about this particular domain that makes good software/procedures impossible to come up with? Sheesh.
    They're written by the cheapest programmers available: the students. Specifically, the students who don't have anything better to do.
  • Izzy (unregistered) in reply to Bappi
    Bappi:
    Joe:
    You all make me feel so OLD! I used to program in punch cards back in the 70's. Happy was the day when we could put sequence numbers on the cards. Before then, should you drop your deck, you had a bit of a problem on your hands.
    "Q: How do you bury an old programmer? A: Face down, nine edge first."

    Let's see how many young whippersnappers get that.

    http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/last.bug.html

  • Dave (unregistered) in reply to Frunobulax
    Frunobulax:
    "Do not fold, spindle or mutilate those unbelievers from a neighboring state." Name the song and artist and win a free cheeseburger in a can!

    Dumb all over - Zappa. I was humming it as I read the story (just finished listening to you can't do that on stage anymore 3 as it happens).

    Captcha: jumentum... Umm... what a kosher person gathers as he/she rolls down a hill?

    Mudsharks?

  • James R. Twine (unregistered) in reply to Lord Parity, Last Count of Register
    Lord Parity:
    ... I took the card to work. In the middle sixty columns I punched "so cancel my membership already". I don't know what that card did when it hit, but I never heard from them again.

    Ha! My second funny read for the day...! I can only imagine what happened to the system that processed that card.

  • (cs) in reply to Mike
    Mike:
    Do the authors get paid by the word? This could have been told in a paragraph at most.

    No, but lame commenters get paid by the sack o' crap. Where would you like yours delivered?

  • kwh (unregistered)

    At my university, it was common to see cards piled up in the corners at registration. People would change their minds at the last minute, or drop them, or whatever. Sometimes you'd see people digging in the piles looking for a card for a class they needed.

    So Robert may NOT have exceeded the enrollment limits: it may be that somebody who had taken a card didn't use it.

  • (cs) in reply to Konamiman
    Konamiman:
    By the mid-80s, things had become much better. I had my first computer in 1986, an MSX that used cassette tapes to store data. One could buy an external 360K disk drive, of course; it just costed about 500 €... that is, 100 € more than the computer itself.

    Wow! You lived in an advanced country, all right!

    Where exactly did you live where you could buy things in Euros in 1986?

  • (cs) in reply to BobB
    BobB:
    I was programming Fortran in the 70s! 79 to be exact.. The year I was born... *COUGH*
    I was born one morning when the sun didn't shine I picked up my keyboard and I typed out some lines I wrote 16 megs of Fortran code The team lead said, "A-well-a bless-a my soul"

    You write 16 megs What do you get One day older and deeper in debt St Peter don't you call me, cuz I can't go I sold my soul to write Fortran code

  • eric76 (unregistered)

    I used to love working summer school registration as a graduate student.

    It's been a more than 30 years since all this so I may have a few details wrong.

    Everyone wanting to register would form into an enormous line outside the gym. The time of day you would go over would depend on your name.

    They'd enter the gym and stand in line for the course they wanted where they would sign up for the course and receive a punch card. Then they'd go to the line for the next course they wanted, if any.

    But those of us working registration would hand our card packets to the faculty memeber who was in charge of us and he'd take care of all our courses. Of course, he didn't stand in line.

    There was also an added advantage if you were single -- you got to meet a lot of undergraduate coeds.

  • Worf (unregistered) in reply to Chris
    Chris:
    The computer they were attached was a Primos system. Funny thing, it allowed direct control of the read arms via assembly. That meant you could move every single read arm from one side to another (made a little bit of a whang! sound). It didn't take a couple of us long to realize that you could time those movements to set up a vibration which would move the entire washing machine.

    And that led to... you guessed it... DISK DRIVE races.

    There is an urban legend that says once some operators did just that, except what they did was walk the disk drive to the door to the room (opening inwards). As a prank, they walked the drive to the door during the weekend, so that when people couldn't enter the room at all on Monday... Can't quite remember how they got in though...

  • TomG (unregistered)

    You can't consider yourself a REAL programmer until you have done a Fortran Compile with the source code on paper tape.

  • MIke (unregistered) in reply to OBloodyhell

    I think you mean that those drives were 3 Megabytes from the 70s.

  • (cs) in reply to KenW
    KenW:
    Konamiman:
    By the mid-80s, things had become much better. I had my first computer in 1986, an MSX that used cassette tapes to store data. One could buy an external 360K disk drive, of course; it just costed about 500 €... that is, 100 € more than the computer itself.

    Wow! You lived in an advanced country, all right!

    Where exactly did you live where you could buy things in Euros in 1986?

    Well, it's just a guess, Ken, but Konamiman might perhaps have taken a short-cut and expressed the relevant prices as a function of current economic units.

    That sort of helps the likes of me. I don't have a huge pointy head like the Mekon, and my skin didn't have a green glowing tint last time I checked the bathroom mirror.

    But ... you go ahead. Keep polishing that pointy thing at the top of your torso. And remember: green is good.

    Nitwit sarcasm also.

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