Smarasderagd writes:

> Any smart-ass time traveler who tries to show me the wonders of the future will return to their home fiction with a sheaf of CompuCorp punch cards wedged up their backside.

The IBM Jargon Dictionary states that the true old-timers will be buried stacked, 9-edge-aligned face-down.

An old-timer is someone who could touch-type on a keypunch.

Scott Dorsey translates:

The layout on keypunches are a bit odd... the number keys are actually doubled over the letters, so you need to shift to get letters. Plus, the feel of the keyboard is very light, even lighter than a Selectric. Very strange to type on.

An old-timer is someone who could program the drum on a keypunch so that new cards automatically skip to column 7, and so that the keypunch automatically skips to the next card after the old-timer types in column 72.

Scott Dorsey translates:

I won't explain the significance of columns 7 and 72 to the Fortran-impaired, but the later keypunches had a programming drum that you wrapped a card around with particular coding information in it. All I ever used it for was setting tabs and fields but you could do a lot of fancier stuff (especially on the 129).

I'm not a real old-timer since the first punch I used was an 029. Real old-timers used an 026.

Diane responds:

When I took my first computer class, most of the punches were 026's. I would expect there were even older models, though.

Gary Heston says:

Scott, you didn't experience the joy of the 024?

How sad. You poor, deprived boy.

Diane adds:

Deprived if he didn't. Depraved if he did. Dilemmas, dilemmas.

An old-timer is someone who could use the duplicate feature on a keypunch to retype a card automatically while adding a character in the middle of the card.

Scott Dorsey translates:

The card punch also had a card-reading arrangement. If you, say, wanted fifty cards with your name on them, to use as bookmarks, you punched your name in one card, advanced it to the read position, and then jammed on the DUP key. This copied one card to another. You could also use it to copy one character at a time, and since you can't unpunch holes, you did this to fix errors rather than backspacing.

Diane responds:

Ah, yes, but the real trick is fixing a variable name when you've left out a letter. You could jam one card in place, and either type or space to move the other, then continue duplicating.

You could also program the drum to auto-duplicate until the input hopper ran out.

Larry Doering adds:

A notch baby is someone who could 'accidentally' jam one of the dozen 026s in the keypunch room, go get a Coke, and come back to find that (oddly enough), the jammed keypunch was still free, clear the jam, and continue punching his WATFIV Game of Life program for CSE 110.

A notch baby is someone who only had to put up with keypunch machines and batch jobs on a Univac 90/70 for one semester before Penn bought more terminals and started allowing undergrads into the terminal room. Ooops, looks like the terminal slipped into half-duplex mode somehow, and nothing shows up on the screen when you type. Time to go get a Coke.

Diane says:

Ah, a meeting of 80-column minds.

An old-timer is someone who could channel-program a 2305 reader/punch to read card input and sort the cards into any one of the three stackers, and mix punched output with card input in stacker 3.

Scott Dorsey translates:

IBM peripherals had their own little state machines built into them, and you could tell the channel controller for a device to go off and do its own thing and interrupt you when it's finished. This is still typical of large machines because it offloads the CPU and makes heavy I/O tasks less of a problem. (Cyber guys should read PPU for channel controller). In any case, writing channel controller code was serious voodoo that systems programmers did.

Of course, I don't know what any of these things mean, and this isn't a dicksize war.