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Admin
Admin
If universities were run by business people, all of these problems would be solved, and for much cheaper.
Admin
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".
Admin
I wish we could figure out a way to do that with automated attendants...
Admin
Make us happy. Submit them; after you graduate?
On the other hand, don't call me that.I've paid my dudes.
Admin
If you explain it to me, i'll get off your lawn. I promise.
Admin
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.
Admin
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
Admin
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.
Admin
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.
Admin
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.
Admin
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.
Admin
Admin
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?
Admin
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.
Admin
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!
Admin
"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?
Admin
_____________________________________________ / 02142 | / | | | |00█0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000| |1111█11111111111111111111111111111111111111111| |222█22█222222222222222222222222222222222222222| |3333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333| |44444█4444444444444444444444444444444444444444| |5555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555| |6666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666| |7777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777| |8888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888| |9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999| -----------------------------------------------
Been that. Done there.Admin
Admin
██_____________________________________________ █/█02142██████████████████████████████ | /████████████████████████████████████ | |████████████████████████████████████ | |00█0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 | |1111█11111111111111111111111111111111111111111 | |222█22█222222222222222222222222222222222222222| |3333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333 | |44444█4444444444444444444444444444444444444444| |5555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555 | |6666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666 | |7777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777 | |8888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888 | |9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 |
Let's try that again.
Admin
██_____________________________________________ █/█02142██████████████████████████████ | /████████████████████████████████████ | |████████████████████████████████████ | |00█0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 | |1111█11111111111111111111111111111111111111111 | |222█22█222222222222222222222222222222222222222| |3333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333 | |44444█4444444444444444444444444444444444444444| |5555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555 | |6666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666 | |7777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777 | |8888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888 | |9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 |
Whoops! I left out the colored stripe.
Admin
Don't anger the sandman. Go to carousel and be renewed!
-Logan.
Admin
yeah, I remember when they invented the pencil...
Admin
Thank GOD I was born in the age of barcodes.
Admin
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.
Admin
Let's not forget the punch card telephone...
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2007/09/04/retro-selectro-card.html
Admin
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 :-)
Admin
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....
Admin
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.
Admin
http://www.fivegulf.com/misc/LastBug.html
Admin
Admin
When you say "paper clips" - would that be what we, around here anyway, call "staples"?
Admin
<Raises hand> I was born as punch cards started to die off, but I still know what that's about.
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.
Admin
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.
Admin
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!
Admin
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.
Admin
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 :-)
Admin
Admin
http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/last.bug.html
Admin
Mudsharks?
Admin
Ha! My second funny read for the day...! I can only imagine what happened to the system that processed that card.
Admin
No, but lame commenters get paid by the sack o' crap. Where would you like yours delivered?
Admin
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.
Admin
Wow! You lived in an advanced country, all right!
Where exactly did you live where you could buy things in Euros in 1986?
Admin
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
Admin
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.
Admin
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...
Admin
You can't consider yourself a REAL programmer until you have done a Fortran Compile with the source code on paper tape.
Admin
I think you mean that those drives were 3 Megabytes from the 70s.
Admin
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.