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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