[PLUG] Punch cards Re: Terabyte paper tape

[Keith Lofstrom]

On Tue, Sep 21, 2021 at 09:26:05AM -0700, Randy Bush wrote:
> funny, i came in a different door; so used hollerith cards (1130, 1401,
> 709x) and a lot of assembler before tape (pdps).

Actually, I did have experiences with Hollerith cards
earlier than PDP-8 paper-tape, but it was not with 
stored program electronic computers.

My mother was attracted to teaching, but left West Texas
Teacher's College during World War 2 to work at Douglas
Aircraft near LA (office work, not rivets).

Years later, She needed to work to pay for my sister's
operations; my father's freelance architectural design
income was not enough.  Bookkeeping work for Beaverton
School District central office was the best approximation
of a teaching career that my mother could attain.

One of her tasks was running the school district's
Hollerith card sorter, which separated punch cards into
bins using simple electro-mechanical logic (not even
arithmetic).  The "program" was entered with a banana-plug
patch panel.  These IBM machines were the descendants of
the early machines that Hollerith designed for sorting
the US census.

A set of 80 character punch cards might have codes for
a student's name (truncated), age, grade, school,
neighborhood, and a few other signifiers.  To find all
the 1953-born students living in Central Beaverton, run
big card decks through the card sorter a few times,
and end up with a few cards that meet the criteria.

Another line-printer-like machine read the text codes
the cards and printed text on fanfold paper.

Imagine sorting cards by age, or alphabetically, without
even a binary arithmetic compare operation.  It can be
done with mental logic, and many sorting passes, and 
moving around a lot of card decks.  Aided by the way
Hollerith cards encoded letters and numbers.

The sorting equipment was old, and might have been world
war 2 surplus.  Mom was smart, but not a geek.  I helped
her puzzle out the IBM manuals (she brought them home to
read after work), and helped her plug the patch panel
on weekends.  I was ten years old or thereabouts.

Does this make me the first member of "plug"?  :-)

Keith

P.S.  This was before a very dark year of my childhood,
so some of those prior memories are suppressed or lost.
In some ways, my life experiences begin at age 13.  If
others claim earlier Hollerith card experience than me,
they are "psychologically" correct.  I used punchcards
with two different IBM 1130s after the PDP-8; I even
managed to hang the PSU 1130 with a mis-punched Fortran
card deck.  But those stories come later.

P.P.S.  Programming can be fun, but analog integrated
circuit design is AWESOME.  

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com