[CHEE]

What ever happened to the good old days where you would spend hours writing FORTRAN or COBOL programs on a coding form, desk check it until your eyes fall out then send it to the key punch department. Twenty-four hours later you would receive the error report along with the card deck. Make the correction on a code sheet, off to key punch. The changed on new punch cards would be returned and you pull the bad cards from the deck (hope not to drop the deck) and replace with the new cards. Now back to the processing department and await the results Twenty four hours later. And on And on And on.

[cynwoody]

What ever happened to the good old days where you would spend hours writing FORTRAN or COBOL programs on a coding form, desk check it until your eyes fall out then send it to the key punch department. Twenty-four hours later you would receive the error report along with the card deck.

Where I worked, we did our own keypunching.

We started with the IBM 029 Printing Card Punch. Hit a key, and the machine punched the character code and advanced to the next column. Wrong key, and you hit 'eject' and grabbed the defective card out of the output stack.

Then we upgraded to the IBM 129. It had a buffer that could store a card's worth of characters. As you keyed, your keystrokes went into the buffer, and a two-digit column number display advanced. There was no character display, however, so you had to remember what your fingers keyed. But it was still a great advance over the 029, because if you made an error and realized it (the more common case), you could backspace in the buffer. When you were done, you pressed the 'eject' key, and the machine punched out the contents of the buffer onto the card and transferred it to the output stack.

IBM 129. Input on the right, card transport from right to left, output stack on the left. That drawer below the keyboard is where the chads landed. I can vouch that the 129 had no problem with hanging chads.