From: Chuck Kuecker (ckuecker@ckent.org)
Date: Sat Jul 06 2002 - 08:38:03 MDT
At 01:20 PM 7/6/2002 +1000, you wrote:
>Yes, but obviously not in computers (which the earlier `ancient joke' post
>was talking about).
>
>http://www.maxmon.com/punch1.htm, say, sez
>
> >the 80 column card shown above overwhelmingly
> >dominated the punched card market from around
> >the 1950s onward.
>
>I used the damned things when I was doing a programming diploma in 1975,
>but I don't know exactly when in the fifties they first went into use in
>computers.
>
>Damien Broderick
Me, too. Learned Fortran and IBM 360 assemble on punch cards. 1971, in my case.
It really depends on your definition of "computer", though. The first truly
programmable computers using the cards were IBM units in the early 1950s -
I have a 1951 issue of the proceedings of one of the first meetings of
computer scientists that is illustrated with not only vacuum tube
processors, but lots of card sorters, which were crudely programmable in
order to sort those bleeping cards. Woe to the operator who dropped a stack
of sorted cards...
Chuck Kuecker
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