64K of memory! Punch cards! Paper tape! Man you had it easy... When I
first started out our computer had 1 byte of memory, read stone tablets
and used papyrus rolls! We had to write tight code to run on that box...
Ah, the good old days.

Paul 



-----Original Message-----
From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of John Dunlop
Sent: Friday, July 20, 2007 2:59 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [HP3000-L] JCL

Kim Borgman wrote :

[snip]
> Here is my job card:
[snip]

This phrase just tickled my nostalgic funny bone as it set off memories
of my first job working for IBM when a Job card was just that.

I worked at the Hursley IBM site as a 19 year old (in 1969) who had
never seen a computer before. I was introduced to programming and had to
use a keypunch machine to set up a huge deck of cards of which the first
card was "the job card" and the next several were all JCL (Job Control
Language) cards. It makes me smile when I think of the huge room
containing a 360/64 computer which consisted of several large
refrigerator size cabinets, all to house 64k of memory (if I remember
correctly -- or was it 64 meg?). Debugging the computer was done by
pressing a switch on the front panel to single step through the program
and a "techie" would write down the numbers based on the lights
displayed to determine what instructions were executing. :o) It now
seems incredible that writing programs required a huge deck of cards to
be punched with a single line on each card (Hollerith springs to mind
!). The tray of cards would be submitted to the operators for overnight
processing and the next day a print out would show you where a
punctuation error had occurred, for example which meant going through
the cards, finding the offending one and replacing it with a corrected
one. Then the whole deck would be resubmitted for overnight processing
again. This pattern would be repeated until the program worked. Heaven
help any operator who dropped a tray of cards and they got all mixed up!

This experience even pre-dated my visit to college where programs were
submitted using paper tape to an ICL 1701 machine.  Paper tape also had
nightmare qualities of its own. It seemed that it was always just as you
got close to the end of a complicated program that the tape would break
and you would have to start again. However, it was a slight improvement
on the cards.

Just thought I would share that with you. I expect others have similar
nostalgic stories.
I for one would enjoy hearing them.  Perhaps Ron Seybold could have a
nostalgia corner somewhere.  :o)

Cheers,

John Dunlop

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