[sdiy] My favorite punch-card story

[Paul Schreiber]

> What great fun that was... writing the program, using the punch-card
> machine to put the program on the cards then submitting the program on
> the cards to the computer center and waiting, sometimes hours, to get
> the cards back along with a printout on wide greenbar paper to find
> out if the program worked or not.

Back in 1976, the school installed an Amdahl 470V, you could load and get a 
result in about 5 seconds! However, most departments only got a budget for 3 of 
the 4 months each semester, so they had a "Happy Hour" every day (6-7PM) where 
the CPU time was free (up to 7 seconds, most runs were like 0.1 seconds) and the 
printout was < 50 pages. So, every day at 5:50PM the line started to form by the 
card reader (mostly COBOL students in Business School). The line printer was 
behind a counter, the intern would sit there and tear off the printouts and 
place them on the counter.

I was running a small Runge-Kutta differential equation solver. I decided to 
screw with the COBOL folks :)

So, I walked up to the reader (there were about 40 people in line, waiting and 
bored), put the cards in, and ran. The printout came in like 3 seconds, the 
intern plopped it up on the counter. I walked over, flipped through the 
*correct* pages (but the folks in line didn't know that!) and muttered "SH&&T! 
You sorry assed piece of CRAP!" and crumbled the printout and tossed it into the 
trashcan. Snickers and grins from COBOL pawns. I then walked back to the card 
reader, removed the top JCL cards (the ones with your account, password, etc) 
and *shuffled* the cards like a poker hand, placed the JCL on top and ran. 
Immediately about 4 people said to each other "Hey! Can you do that?" and I 
walked over, got the printout (with about 155 errors) and said "ALRIGHT!" and 
gleefully walked past them out the door.

Paul S.