Have you ever re-looked at your code and realized it was some piece of uttermost rubbish?

[Diceman]

Weeeeeell someone Has to ask:
What about the CommandoWear?
That would make one a walking ../assuming one can at that those Temps/.. Cryobank in the AI* Industry.

A friend once left Canada It was negative 40c he disembarked here 18hours later it was positive 40.

Er maybe we should relook at the code of this thread

*(insemination)

I don't know if you remember the Seinfeld episode about George Costanza's "shrinkage", but going commando at -40F would take that to a whole new level.
The "jewels" would go into hiding and not be seen until the spring thaw.

 

[Diceman]

What were you coding, and where? Some sort of gift logistics solution near the North Pole?

I was a contract programmer who worked on dozens of Fortran programs to get them up and running on a minicomputer which they just purchased. I'm not sure what they used prior to that, it could have been punch cards. They had mines all over the region and some of the software estimated ore production and the lifespan of the mines. All I can say is if you were going to Santa's workshop chances are you'd have to go through that region.

 

[Sandman]

Ah, Fortran...

Ah, punch cards...

But you know what they say about Real Programmers...

https://xkcd.com/378/

 

[rabbitBUSH]

Ah, punch cards...

AHHHHHHHHHHH! punch cards spread out down the staircase . . . . . Only let it happen once . . . but it made an interesting jersey when it went through the loom.

 

[Diceman]

A keypunch machine was very high tech when I started (1972). This was the first year computer programming was taught in school. We first had to spend a year filling out OMR (optically mark recognition) cards using a pencil in high school. Then the teacher would have to take boxes of cards down to the university 6 miles away to run them through every night and return the printout to us the next day. No, he didn't ride a horse to get there. A horse would have been faster. He drove a beat up Falcon with a manual transmission, a broken muffler and bald tires. It got to its destination fueled by hope and a prayer. On the rare occasion he would take a group of us with him, I'd be in the back seat biting my lower lip trying not to burst out laughing watching the teacher's animated actions coaxing the car to cooperate by switching gears every 10 seconds as the car lurched forward to the sound of grinding gears.

Anyway, the OMR cards were for Fortran and contained only 17 characters so to use the full 80 character width we would need around 4 cards. Reading lines of programs by rifling through an OMR deck is a bit of a pain because you see only 17 characters at a time and you would have to "Continue" the cards to form an 80 character line. In fact I found one of these OMR cards on my desk this morning (I use them for bookmarks) so I filled it out to say "B4X Rocks". Hopefully it's readable. After 48 years the purple ink is a bit faded. There is another OMR card below it which is green and is a bit more readable.

At university I used a keypunch and never ever dropped a deck in the 3 years I used the keypunch (undergrads used keypunches). We would hand the deck of cards off to a card operator which fed them into a card reader and we'd get the printout around the corner as it came off the printer. I remember if there was a cute new girl feeding the cards through I would grab my 400 card deck with one hand and nonchalantly hand it to her just to watch her face turn to panic as she tries to grab the cards without dropping them. I was a bit of a trickster back then. Still am.

Starting at 3rd year we switched to dumb terminals like VuCom's and 2741's for APL. You'd think this was an advantage but there were only about 10 to 15 of these terminals for all the computer science and engineering students so there were long line ups to get access to a terminal. I ended up building a computer terminal from a kit and along with an acoustic coupler I was dialed into the University from home 24/7 in my pj's while everyone else was slaving away under florescent lights in the engineering building. This was before Apple II's were released.

That was a stroll down memory lane. Programmers today with PC's and the Internet don't realize how lucky they are. Programming 40+ years ago meant we spent most of our time reading printouts while waiting for our jobs to run. The first 4 programming (summer) jobs I had, I used mainframes and minicomputers. The turnaround for compiles were usually 24 hours and sometimes we'd be lucky if we got 2 compiles done in a day. And if the program was up and running but the job aborted, we didn't have an error message that told us which line of code was at fault. Oh no! All we got was a hex address where the error occurred. We'd then use that hex address to debug a 20 page PL/I hex dump of the program to try and determine which procedure caused the problem. Then make the changes to the program, submit the batch compile and wait until tomorrow to see if it worked.

Yup, the programmers today have it easy. By that I mean at least they aren't wasting their time waiting for resources. They can get their ideas into code and running faster today than ever before.

 

[klaus]

Is this what we call the good old times !?

 

[Sandman]

@Diceman Great read, thanks for sharing! ?

 

[rabbitBUSH]

Is this what we call the good old times !?

Only the OLD ones, us young guys are just laughing away.

I remember if there was a cute new girl feeding the cards

I see that isn't the card type that had the index holes around the edge, so when she dropped them she just needed a bicycle spoke to shake them into order (the same spoke she probably used on undergrads)

Interesting thing is that the multiple choice cards used in exams these days work in the exact same way . . . so don't worry the undergrads today don't have a clue they're in the Zone . . . .

Come to think of it . . . that's ALSO the way they count votes in USA (isn't it)? In particular the ones they send off to be counted in another country (according to TinTin - El Tantrum Trumpo).

 

[udg]

Well, my keypunch machine's experience is very similar to what @Diceman described, but a decade later.
It was 1982, engineering building of the oldest University at the world (Bologna, 1088). Long, badly-illuminated hallways sported a few keypunch machines having their keyboards' keys often made unreadable by the prolonged use. Once ready, our decks where taken to the mythical operators (those semi-gods having access to the restricted area where a PDP-11, a VAX 750 and a few other jewels where living). Then the wait for results began.
A few of us (well, I know for sure just another guy in addition to me), selected by the professor (the one sitting on the throne of that Olympus) were admitted to a small room with 6 to 8 terminals as a recognition for something (skill, dedication, luck..).
No cute girls around. Well, almost not girls at all (about 10 out of 410 for my first year..this explains why I spent some time in other departments as well..eheh)

Anyway, the funny part of the story is that many of us had at home PCs more powerful than those at the University. Mine was an Olivetti M20, a 16 bit machine, 128KB RAM, 320x200 graphics, two 5.25 floppies (not sure but I seem to remember 160KB on each side).

I can't believe it was 40yrs ago..tell me it was 10 and probably I could believe you, but forty...c'mon, it can't be.

 

[Sandman]

I can't believe it was 40yrs ago

I remember my mom telling me they didn't have a fridge when she was a kid, about 60 years ago. To me that feels so extremely weird, it feels more fitting for perhaps 100 or 150 years ago. Today most of us own and handle a mobile super computer daily. Mind. Blown. I wonder what we will see in 60 years.

 

[Diceman]

I remember my mom telling me they didn't have a fridge when she was a kid, about 60 years ago. To me that feels so extremely weird, it feels more fitting for perhaps 100 or 150 years ago. Today most of us own and handle a mobile super computer daily. Mind. Blown. I wonder what we will see in 60 years.

We take a lot of things for granted. When I was around 6 my grandparent rented a summer "cottage" at the beach. What can I say but my granddad was frugal. How frugal you ask? The cottage had an ice box, wood stove, outhouse, water pump on the street. It had electricity for the lights and radio and that's about it. No car and of course no TV. To my grandparents this was normal for them because that's how they lived a few decades earlier. To me it was like landing on mars. It was a minimalist approach to life and truth be told it was a lot of fun. We'd get a block of ice delivered every couple of days for the icebox, we'd have to prime the pump on the street and carry in water to do the dishes. (The pump didn't always cooperate.) We'd have to stoke the old pot bellied wood stove with logs and scraps of newspaper. And of course we walked everywhere to do shopping etc. and could only buy as much as we could carry the long walk home. I never complained because I thought this was normal cottage life. The only thing I didn't like was waking up at 6AM because it was freezing cold in bed and we had to get up to light the wood stove. I always thought farmers got up before the crack of dawn because they were devoted to their work. I'm not so sure. I think they got up before dawn because they were freezing to death in bed!

Now when I hear a kid or parent complain their Internet sucks at the lake cottage, I bite my tongue and shed a crocodile tear for them. They are missing out on what real life is all about.