Distrowatch

[Steve Haines]

On Sunday 03 April 2005 23:33, Bob Nielsen wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 04, 2005 at 01:04:09PM +1000, Peter Garrett wrote:
> > Aye, well....
> >
> > When *I* were lad, used to punch out Fortran IV, on mechanical
> > punch keyboard.... carry deck 'o cards to front counter of Computer
> > Centre, *queue* for privilege of using IBM mainframe, and come back
> > *a day later* to find printout of bugs!
>
> Ah, memories!  Once (about 35 years ago) I dropped a whole deck on my
> way to the building with the remote card reader (our mainframe was in
> another facility about 50 miles away, with a modem connection).
> Fortunately the cards were numbered and we had a sorter where I
> worked.
>
We didn't have the sorter . . . just ran a heavy diagonal line across 
the top of the deck with a magic marker! It helped when you got several 
out of sequence. I carried a suitcase full of cards from D.C. to 
California on Christmas 1972 to run them through the BIG machine to 
compile a program. The Big Banana had 32 kb of ram . . . our East Coast 
box had only 16 kb.
-- 
Steve in Paraguay