OK... and for some even more bizarre punched card trivia... perhaps Tony
can explain the "Crunch Card" details :)

He can elaborate... but basically... back to the "student submitted job
decks" we started with...

If some kid's job ran astray (e.g., read beyond end-of-file markers [by
default a "/*" card]) it could suck down the remaining jobs in the
reader queue with it.

Our Knoxville counterparts devised a scheme whereby there was an
"absolute job delimiter" special card that was absolutely and positively
the end of a job.  Every submitted job had to "start" with a crunch
card, and it was a hard and predictable delimiter.

The "crunch card" was a binary-punched card (you couldn't possibly
accidentally punch one on a keypunch).  It was also completely
symmetrical... it was the same data whether you read it face-up,
face-down, 9-edge leading, or 12-edge leading; it was one in the same. 
I have no idea what data was actually on the card other than it was
clearly not "a normal punch card".  I'm also not sure of the origin of
it... Knoxville's computer was running OS/MVT originally, and the
spooler was HASP (Houston Automatic Spooling Program); but they had
modified it locally so not sure if this was a HASP "feature" or
something that UTK added on their own.  Heck... Tony may have done it in
the first place...

We used to duplicate the crunch cards on blue card stock so they really
stuck out like a sore thumb :)  I still recall that nearly 40 years
later.  No crunch card, no job, no dice, no fun.  They were absolutely
essential.

But back to the keypunches...  if I remember models correctly, there was
the 029 (punched cards real-time), the 129 (buffered a card, you could
"backspace", only punched the card once you released it), and this
service bureau I worked for had some key-to-disk things that "punched"
(wrote) data to floppy diskettes.  When they were done and verified, you
loaded the diskettes into another IBM thing that loaded the diskettes to
9-track tapes that were used as data input on the mainframe.

Well, I digress yet again, and should probably hush :)

Jeff

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