I also started on cards, still had to use them for one second year
project to write a compiler.  By the time the project was done you had
an entire box of cards; you quickly learned to use sequence numbers on
your cards so that you could run them through a sorter in case you
dropped them...

By the time I started actually working in the industry the big main
frames were on their way out but I did get to work on one monster IBM
360/75 a bit.  That machine would not have fit in most peoples homes.
The 50 or so disk drives were each the size of a washing machine.  One
MB of memory was the size of two refrigerators, we actually had 3 MB
on that machine which was huge at the time it was configured. (I guess
that is part of the reason for Bill Gates figuring that 64MB would be
more than anyone would ever need).  One of the things we used to like
to do for tour groups, when the big bosses weren't around was pop off
a top panel on the main CPU, have someone walk inside the system, shut
it up and them have them wave out of the top of the machine when the
tour group was up in the observation deck; yes you could stand inside
the CPU...

On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 6:49 AM, Cleveland, Kyle E.
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Yeah, those were the days.  I recall one time when this Asian kid (math
> majors always seem to be Asian back then..dunno why.) was carrying this
> huge box of Hollerith cards out of the Electrical Engineering building
> at Ohio State and he tripped.  Cards went everywhere.  I figured at
> first it was just a few lines of code and the rest were data cards, but
> by the way he was screaming/crying I soon figured out it was an entire
> deck of FORTRAN source code.  Poor kid.
>

-- 
Peter Hunsberger

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