Re: CHAT: INTERSYSTEMAL CONLANG

On 1 July, Jeff Jones wrote:

> My first job in the computer racket was to be in charge of the students'
> waiting list ... and kicking them out when their time was up.
>
    Must have been nice! Where I was, students were
allowed to "hog" the machines until they were done!
IIRC, there was a sort of informal "pecking order".
Graduate students working on a professor's research
could kick out a grad student working on his own
stuff. Grad students of any persuasion could keep
the keypunches away from undergrads. And
undergrads: well...  ;-)


> Manual typewriters. Never could use one of the damn things -- it took both
> thumbs to press the shift key. At least with punch cards, you didn't have
> to retype the whole page (unless, like some of us, you made at least one
> typo per card).
    The floor around my machine was usually littered with ripped-up
punch-cards (I was a sloppy typist! I could easily go through
half a dozen tries until I got a perfect card! :-P  )


>
> The nifty thing was we'd have to remember to insert an @EBCDIC card at the
> start of the deck to tell the system to translate the cards into ASCII,
> otherwise it would be total garbage. And then, the job would print out on
> an uppercase-only line printer for which administrative computing didn't
> bother to supply a correct translation table, so brackets would print as
> underscores and underscores as widgets etc. Before the program could be
> debugged, the listing had to be deciphered.

Ahh, those fond memories!  ;-)

Dan Sulani
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