Also, those of
us who used to
punch cards, but saw how
totally cool time sharing was.
I got out of that
shit as soon as I could!
The 5081
Unit Record,
invented by
Herman Hollerith for the turn of the century
census sucked for anything other than
data collection.
In a
big way!
It was used in the early
1980's by many
universities in their
computer science classes.
As a
tool to write
large programs, typically in
fortran or
pascal, you just had to
pray that you didn't
drop the
big box containing your
cards (i.e., program).
Also, the
computer operator might
accidentally or
on-purpose drop it, so here was another
source of
agnst.
Punch cards were notoriously fragile, and envelopes that at the time were intended to contain such a card were preprinted with the
disclaimer "Do not fold, spindle or mutilate".
The card punch
machine gave rise to an entire
cult of tools and
devices that were
purported to help the
programmer.
There were
special saws and
gloves and
sorting
machines, and even
devices that would
annotate your cards with
sequence numbers and such.
All in all, I'm glad I
hopped over to a
PDP-11 running
RSX/11M and
RSTS/E as soon as I got a chance.
Cards
suck!