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Admin
My dad use to program in FORTRAN where you submitted your program once a day to run. If you messed up you had to wait until tomorrow. The decks were held together by rubber bands.
So you had lots of programmers with lots of time on their hands ... and plenty of rubber bands.
My dad could hit 3 inch shot groups at 10 yards..
Me, if I saw another programmers cards left unsecured, I just shuffled it.
Admin
Not really related to the story at hand, but I still found it quite entertaining: I googled "bundy clock" just to verify that it meant what I suspected. One of the google image hits was for a software client to a software system for similar use, but that in itself isn't the point either.
Take a look at the folders on this desktop. http://www.pcpunchclocksystem.com/images/bundy%20pix/remote%20bundy.JPG (It's from the page at http://www.pcpunchclocksystem.com/remotebundy.html . )
Admin
I started at the University of Maryland in the fall of 1982. The first year, registration was "computer assisted"--we all gathered in the armory (I believe), where there were folding tables all around, each staffed with people armed with huge stacks of green bar printout. You'd fill out an "add" card and stand in line, hoping that when you got to the front there would be seats left in your class. Your registration was a filled-in dot on a number of printed circles on the green bar report.
If there weren't enough seats, your name was added to a waitlist, and you had to check in every day to see if a spot became available.
The lines weren't terribly long, as the tables were organized by department, but it was a fairly slow process; you had to go around to a number of different tables, waiting in a (hopefully) line for each. Of course, there were always a couple of essential departments (e.g. math) where the lines were 15-20 minutes or more.
I don't remember much more than this, because I thankfully had to do it only once. I do remember piles of add/drop cards strewn all over the floor. It was kind of cool.
Next year, everything was computerized. Woo hoo. You would stand in a line, wait to get to the front, and someone sitting at a computer would ask for the information from your "add" card, and they would handle interacting with the computer for you.
Unfortunately, the mental midgets at Maryland figured that since they had such a wonderful computerized system, they only needed a few lines: one for all "adds," one for "drops," and one for "withdrawals." Or something like that. Not by department. I remember the average wait time being 45 minutes.
Worse: I ended up getting waitlisted on one important class. I showed up daily for a couple days, wasting almost an hour each time waiting in the line to check to see if I had gotten the class. "Nope, try again tomorrow."
Finally... someone had dropped the course, and the computer indicated that I could attend it! Woo hoo! I'm excited.
Then the operator says to me, "Ok, now you have to go over to the add line to enroll in the course." I was dumbstruck. "You're kidding, right?" Nope.
I guess the year in college had taught me a bit of impertinence--I threw a mild fit right there, insisting that I wasn't about to waste another hour because they were too retarded to devise a non-abusive system. The woman in charge, very angrily, said, "Fine! Here, I'll add it." I felt a bit boorish, but hell, I was going to be late for class otherwise. I took it.
Some years later, the system finally became "generally available" and was not so abusive.
Admin
I'm beginning to wonder if every college course registration requires some sort of trick. At my school we registered primarily for courses by phone. Registration opened at 8:00 PM and naturally the line was always busy for hours after that. The trick(?) was to call about five or ten minutes early and keep the automated attendant busy speaking various menu prompts until the clock rolled around and the registration menu became unlocked.
Admin
There is an apocryphal story circulating at my alma mater that a student took random handfuls of discarded cards form the recycle bin, decked them up, fed them to the PL/C optimizing compiler, and they produced a working program.
I think PL/C was supposed to to that (according to Wikipedia) but it's still a good story.
And yes, we had recycling bins in the 70s, punch card stock was expensive.
And punch card chad was disposed of very carefully - get a piece in your eye and you have an instant scratched cornea.
And gas was only 29c a gallon! Yes sirree!
Well, my goiter's acting up, gotta go.
Admin
My first year at University was the last year of punch cards.
They took all the punch cards machines into the center courtyard and we got to smash them to bits (pun intended) with a sledgehammer for a $1 donation.
Ahhh, the good old days.
Admin
When I finished University, I applied for a few jobs with the "Computer Programmer". My Mother thought this was hilarious as she had been a Computer Programmer before I was born. As her Computer Programmer her only job was to load trays of punch cards into the computer in the correct order. I joked that things have changed quite a bit since then.
10 years later, I've come to realise that to some Computer Programmers the only thing thats really changed is that they now do the job sat down.
Admin
Admin
Heh, heh. I went to school in the early 80's. Much to my frustration, the school was still using punch cards which meant standing on line with 500 other IT majors in order to get your final program in at the end of the semester.
Naturally, the IBM system kept crashing. My Cobol instructor, who insisted that PC's would never be widely used, gave me a B- because I didn't get my assignment in on time. I switched to PC programming (Basic and C) and I never looked back.
Fun times.
Admin
A more modern take on course registration:
My school had a telnet interface to it's course registration system (running on VAX) A web interface also existed, which was rumored to be slow. I wouldn't know, I never used it.
The whole system only let on a few dozen students at once. So, typical behavior was to hammer the poor system, by hitting refresh in your browser, or re-running the command in telnet. Of course, this behavior bogged down the system at critical times, and was discouraged. A wrapper program was developed at some point that prevented hammering, only allowing a request every 5 minutes.
Long story short, student who knew how to list VAX processes soon found the original name of the registration program and stopped using the wrapper. These students were able to hammer the system, and generally would get in, and were able to register for courses while the poor art students were still hitting "refresh" in their browsers.
Admin
At my first job (an insurance company), we figured out how to store three digits per column (4 rows = 4 bits, 12 rows / 4 = 3 digits).
We thus turned the punched card into a 240-column card. This cut down on processing time caused by reading the cards.
It was murder when they jammed and we had to re-constitute them.
Admin
A similar setup was used in Newton, MA (mid-70's), except the homeroom teacher would submit cards for the the present students. As the occasional runner, I amused myself by adding cards I punched myself for students with funny names, who would eventually show up on the teacher's list of students. Hilarity (or at least puzzlement) ensued.
Yeah, I thought it was amusing. No, I didn't have a girlfriend at the time. Yes, I was a nerd.
Admin
And the sharp-cornered chad made the best confetti, almost impossible to remove from hair, shag rugs (the 1970s, remember), etcetera.
...underwear. We had an annoying individual on our dorm floor. He made the mistake of leaving for the weekend. We filled his room with newspaper, and his clothing with cardpunch chad (I worked at the computing center)
He was still finding it when he returned the next year,
Admin
"Hello, Initrode Inc here. I suppose you think you are VERY FUNNY, Mr. Robert ');DROP TABLE customers;--, do you?"
Admin
It was 1979. I was in my first year of Engineering. I would take my stack of 30(!) punch cards to Bison Debug Room and wait for a turn at the card reader. Usually there were more people in line than cards in my stack.
One evening, I was in line outside the room when I heard a clatter of footsteps: someone was racing up the hallway. I had a brief vision of student racing towards the line with a large box in each arm. The hall had two steps down and he apparently misjudged them.
The expression on his face as he surveyed the wasteland of punch cards that was once his program was enough to cause all of us to look away.