Well, looks like some are older than me, but I once worked on a BIG project, I was the system designer, more or less, and I had someone called a program analyst and a programmer working with me. The program was written in FAP. One day after a trial run, after we found an error, the keypunch machines were unavailable. Our programmer made a patch to fix the error by cutting a very precise hole in a punch card with an exacto knife.
Fun days. We used to keep our bowling scores in octal to keep in practice for reading core dumps. (Yes memory was in a large array of tiny rings called magnetic cores).
As I recall, I took the first computer class at my college, and we wrote our first program to take square root using Newton's method on a drum storage machine -- I don't recall it's name.
John V.
On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 12:25:02PM -0400, Raffael Cavallaro wrote:
On Mar 12, 2013, at 11:21 AM, Bradley Lucier lucier@math.purdue.edu wrote:
In the name of all punchcard-programming grandpas, all I can say is "Ouch, that one hurt."
Yikes! What does it say that before I graduated to punch cards I learned to program by toggling switches to enter individual bytes? :)
warmest regards,
Ralph
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