"Wayne.B" wrote in message
news
On Fri, 27 Jan 2006 07:07:15 GMT, "Bryan"
wrote:

I forgot all about dot matrix printers. I realized the other day that my
kids have no idea about the punch cards!

Punched cards were hi tech. I started on punched paper tape with no
real editing capability. We had this huge clunky machine called a
Burroughs Flexowriter with a keyboard which punched the tape. The
computer was a Control Data 160A, as big as a desk, 4K of memory and
it cost about $80K circa 1967. To compile and run a Fortran program
it was first necessary to read the tape with the boot loader, then the
tape with the Fortran compiler, followed by the source code tape
(twice), and finally it would spit out a new tape with the object code
on it. At that point you were ready to re-boot and test your program.


I remember punched tape. In 1973, I worked for a land company that
purchased a computer to keep track of the accounting of property owner's
installment contracts. The computer was made by Singer, of all things. The
program was loaded via punched tape,and the individual property owner
records were on large heavy paper ledger cards. Each ledger card had a
magnetic strip along the long side, retaining the data for each account.
Account activity was also printed on the ledger card by a dot matrix
printer. The same device read and wrote the mag strip and printed the
activity on the card. Presumably the individual account data needed to be
stored on the ledger cards because the computer itself didn't have the
storage capability to do it.

At the same time I was taking a Fortran class in college. I would type code
into a teletype machine and then sometime later go to the computer center to
retrieve a stack of punch cards. The punch cards would then be loaded into
the computer and the program compiled and run and a printout delivered.
Only to find a typo on line 32. Arrrgh! Start over.