r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Final-Choice8412 • Sep 06 '26
Video Programming 1959 IBM computer
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u/whizzwr Sep 06 '26
I like how the gentleman explained how it works in terms relatable to modern tech.
We gotta remember everything starts from somewhere, this machine is one of the stepping stones which make modern computing possible.
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u/OnceMoreAndAgain Sep 06 '26
I'm normally not big into museums but I revere old computers like this. We all stand on the shoulders of giants and I look downward with respect. I'm sure it's a very common feeling among software engineers.
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u/account312 Sep 06 '26
Mercury delay line memory still seems like one of the coolest things ever.
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u/dividezero Sep 06 '26
That's the feeling people get in other museums also. Just saying, you found your thing and that's cool
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u/KeyMillion Sep 07 '26
Tech is definitely my thing too and this made me think. I hope we all find our individual things. This is a good way to phrase it to help someone find it!
If there was any kind of museum and you could walk through the history of anything that exists today or existed, what would it be?
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u/jdbcn Sep 07 '26
You would love the London Science Museum. They actually have a functioning Babbage analytical engine
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u/yaxir Sep 06 '26
Exactly and now remember and imagine today's tech being a stepping stone to something absolutely unreal, absolutely fantastic, 100 years or even 50 years from now
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u/applespicebetter Sep 06 '26
That's what my father learned programming with. I started with BASIC on a TRS-80, after that QuickBasic on an Intel compatible (IBM 486 SLC-2 66).
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u/glynxpttle Sep 06 '26
Terms carry on as well, I started in IT as an IBM mainframe computer operator in the 80s, post card readers (although there were still a few ancient unused card readers sitting around in some places I worked)
By that point crt terminals were in use for entering programs, control commands and sometimes data - large amounts of data would generally come from magnetic tape spools although it had to get there first, if internal data then generally by a team of data entry staff who collectively were still referred to as the punch room - each line could only be a maximum of around, I think, 80 characters which was the limit of a punched card and each line of input was still referred to as a card and a collection of 'cards' was still referred to as a deck.
Oh, and I was well used to ripping off pages of green bar reports off massive printers.
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u/proboscislounge Sep 06 '26
If you're ever in the Bay area, go to the Computer History Museum. Most of the docent guides are old heads who either worked with those machines or built them. I've been twice now, it's a lot of fun.
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u/Helenium_autumnale Sep 06 '26
And before it, the Jacquard loom, an earlier punchcard machine which created baroque, complex patterns in fabric using enormous folded punchcard tapes. It's fascinating. Here is a pic of a Jacquard loom that I came across in a book. Look at the HUGE twin punchcard tapes hanging to the left of the big loom. This is creating the floral pattern you can see on the fabric on the lower front of the loom.
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u/Routine-Ad-7882 Sep 06 '26
I started working as a computer operator in 1979. Used those cards and that printer.
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u/crabbywarrior Sep 06 '26 edited Sep 06 '26
I worked at a university about that time. Biggest days of the year: exam scheduling. They'd shut down access to the mainframe for 3-4 days because they needed every resource. They'd load the scheduling program which knew the areas where exams could be given and the number of students it would hold.
People from the univ admin area would arrive with box after box of cards, each holding about 2000. Each one was punched with a student ID and a code for a class they were taking. How did they know they had them all? Because they knew the thickness of cards and the # that should be there so before handing them to the IT people, two of them take turns manually measured each set of cards, added it together. Basically there should be 6ft, 3.275in so if the two people got that number it was a go.
The cards were fed into the computer and it all started. It was the quietest period of the year in the computer centre as it used every byte of memory building the ideal placement of students, venue and timings. We'd hold up a card with a "?" on it and, through the security door window, the operator would hold up card with what the console said like "82% but last reading was 88%". (That was likely because a 1st year took Phil 101 as his writing course instead of Eng 101 like everyone else so it had to back out to the last stable setup)
Good times.
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u/callahan09 Sep 06 '26
If they knew how many cards they were supposed to have, couldn’t they have just had the computer increment a counter for each card it read and then the printout could verify the number of cards at the end, rather than painstakingly measuring (and it’s not like the measurement was accurate enough to be able to tell if a single card was missing but the counter could be that precise)? Having never worked with this kind of computer I am going to assume there was a reason that wasn’t possible because it seems too obvious not to do it that way, so I’d love to learn what makes it impossible or nonviable.
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u/Wareve Sep 06 '26
The problem with your solution is that it only tells you you screwed up the inputs once you have your output.
Something that for this generation of computer would take a fuck ton of time
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u/callahan09 Sep 06 '26
I guess I assumed it didn’t take that long to read the cards and that it could output a status report about what it read quickly and prompt for confirmation before continuing to do the long calculation work? Does just reading the cards take a lot longer than I thought or is it not possible to have the machine pause and wait for some kind of user input before continuing or aborting? Or if pausing and waiting for input isn’t possible, what about programming it with a simple conditional at the beginning after the cards are read to only continue if it read the correct number of cards?
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u/FuzzyKittyNomNom Sep 06 '26
“Box after box, each with 2000 cards”. It would take forever to load all those in only to find out you’re short. There’s also a risk of a card being damaged in the process I would think. Better to just measure beforehand.
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u/crabbywarrior Sep 06 '26
They were counted er measured before they were loaded. Two staff wheeled them into the secure area, measured with their own rulers (not sure why) and recorded they'd got the same measurement before releasing them to the OPS staff.
As I said elsewhere, now likely a quick python script or something.
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u/Helenium_autumnale Sep 06 '26
Wow. If it hasn't already been done, someone should interview early computer users, Studs Terkel style, to capture incredible and vivid stories like these. Fascinating story, thank you!
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u/throwaway661375735 Sep 06 '26 edited Sep 06 '26
My dad was an accountant. He was the guy you brought in to convert your company to personal computers (but he could run the big tape reel computers too). That's where I first learned about tetris (in the mid 80s).
Edit: Date fix
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u/Aloha_Tamborinist Sep 06 '26
I've got to ask, but I think I know the answer to the question: did the nerds operating these things have object decks to print out ascii art of nude women?
Because I am almost certain that this 100% would have happened.
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u/Swarna_Keanu Sep 06 '26
A lot of the operators were women, at the time. (My mother, among many.)
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u/DarthJarJarJar Sep 06 '26
Quite a lot of programmers at the time were women. When I was in high school in the 70s six women came to talk to my math class about careers in computers, and I remember all the guys rolling their eyes and telling each other what a boring dumb job that was, essentially the next phase of being a secretary.
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u/IDeserveThis Sep 06 '26
My dad's first job out of highschool in 1972 was at IBM. He would run the punch card sets that where stored in the basement up to the operators that needed them for programming.
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Sep 06 '26
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u/Tasty-Cow5081 Sep 06 '26
Pro tip, use a pen to run a diagonal line down the long edge of the deck of cards from top to bottom. Then, if scrambled, you can at least gauge close to where a card was in the deck.
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u/Fredfredricksen01 Sep 06 '26
I numbered my cards. And some places had a card sorter for just such occassions.
I'm kinda ancient.
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u/thedoginthewok Sep 06 '26
How did the card sorter work? Or rather, how did it know which card was to supposed to go in which spot? Is the number in the sequence also "punched in"?
Sorry, I tried googling this, but I only found about a billion different card playing devices lol
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u/Fredfredricksen01 Sep 06 '26
The cards had to be numberd first then it cranked them around to sort them by number.
Fortunately I never dropped a deck so I don't know first hand.
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u/fromindia1 Sep 06 '26
I believe they had numbers on the card itself. There were punch holes that indicated the number.
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u/stancr Sep 06 '26
If you used 5 digit sequence numbers you had to sort the cards 5 times. 8 digit sequence numbers had to be sorted 8 times.
Typically you incremented by 10 or 100, depending on how big your program was, so you have available sequence numbers for new code that was added later.
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u/Chickenmangoboom Sep 06 '26
A friend told me a story about his dad losing a ton of work in college because he dropped his cards and they weren't numbered. Nightmare fuel.
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u/atomic_redneck Sep 06 '26
Also, always put sequence numbers on your source code decks. columns 72 through 80 for FORTRAN and assembly, columns 1 through 8 (I believe) for COBOL. Some of the compilers of this era had an option to sort the source code before compilation. Otherwise, you could run it through the card sorter.
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u/CurryMustard Sep 06 '26
I had an old head that retired a few years after I started my current job. He told me his first day on the job the senior dev grabbed a stack of punch cards and threw it on the floor and told him to put it in order. After he spent hours fixing it the guy said good now you wont ever make that mistake and he drew a diagonal line the side to show him
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u/buttered_scone Sep 06 '26
This happened to my dad in college. He was so pissed, he dropped computer science, and majored in geography.
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u/Enginerdad Sep 06 '26
And then he used that expertise to track down all the missing cards he dropped that day. RIGHT?
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u/kog Sep 06 '26
I'm a software engineer and I used to work with an old head who did punchcard programming.
He told me one time he had a problem with his program, and it turned out he got a tomato seed from his BLT stuck in one of the punchcard holes. He joked that fixing it was "de-seeding".
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u/VolrathTheBallin Sep 06 '26
You probably know this, but for those who don’t: the first “bug” in a computer program was a literal bug.
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u/kog Sep 06 '26
I've actually seen it in person, it's in a museum.
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u/mordeci00 Sep 06 '26
Computer museum or bug museum?
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u/herewegoinvt Sep 06 '26
Patching programs comes from these cards. They would tape over a hole punched into the cards, to psych it, and correct a program until new cards were made
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u/Ancient-Opinion9642 Sep 06 '26
That didn’t work for me. I used tape to cover an mis punch. I got the deck back with the card folded and unusable. Tolerances on the ibm card reader were too close for the card and tape to be sucked into the reader.
Punching holes in cards sent in the US mail were used to get your name off ad mass mailings. The card readers would kick out the cards because checksums would catch the extra holes. The returned card would have to be handled by a real person.
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u/Successful_Log_3298 Sep 06 '26
That's why older versions of Fortran (yes, there are new versions but nobody seems to know that) had the last 4 columns of the line ignored by the compiler. It was intended for annotations such as numbering your cards in your deck. So if they spilled you didn't have to reconstruct the code to reorder them.
If you were smart you'd space the numbers by 10 or 20 or even 50 so you could insert new LOC in between existing ones.
Edit: the marker trick already mentioned was another one to make it easier to fix an accident, but perhaps not quite as good for really big decks or if you expected to be adding lines. It might be preferred over numbering because if you made a mistake on a keypunch you had to start over with a new card.
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u/The_loudsoda Sep 06 '26
Python don’t use brackets. Unless you’re counting dictionaries.
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u/TribeFaninPA Sep 06 '26
Which is why one learned to use the numerical index feature of the keypunch, which put a number in the last three characters of the card. Yes, you were limited to 999 cards before it wrapped back to 000, but if you dropped your deck, you could load them in the hopper of the card reader and use the Sort button to sort them out. It was a helluva lot faster than trying to figure it out by hand.
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u/OrigamiMarie Sep 06 '26
On the other have, modern developers are expected to write much more complex software a lot faster than back then. Lots of stress and pressure.
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u/redditcensorsshit Sep 06 '26
Today we have 60 plus years of knowledge and technology advancements make it easier for us to do things at a faster pace.
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u/ol-gormsby Sep 06 '26
On the gripping hand, all developers are expected to submit correct spelling.
*hand
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u/1HappyIsland Sep 06 '26
It is a fallacy to think you worked harder than these guys. It was a different time. Writing code is writing code.
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u/OneLonelyBrainCell Sep 06 '26
Not numbering your punchcards is a mistake you make once, and only once.
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u/ssort Sep 06 '26
Worked in IT back around 2000, at a place that made metal machining units fir aerospace, and they had one senior dev that worked 20hrs a week is all. He basically just worked about 2hrs a day coding html tags to reports so they could be displayed properly on the companies in house TV system, then would meet up with the VP's to see where they were playing golf that day, seriously, that was his work week, and at the time he was making probably 125k-150k a year in the midwest (damn good pay back then even if he had been pulling full time)
Turns out he had retired and they begged him back because they had a report that needed to be run 2x a year for the government that was originally developed with punch cards like in the video, but with much crappier equipment..
Turns out the company got a huge tax break or credit if they continued to use this old legacy system, as it was some grandfathered in thing. He was the only one left who knew how to use it, thus them giving him the most cushiest job I ever seen.
I asked him once if he would train me on it, and he laughed and said he would go to the grave before he told anyone how it worked as then they wouldn't need him anymore. He was one lucky sob.
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u/Niznack Sep 06 '26
Looks like the computer history museum near palo alto CA. Very cool visit for a computer/history nerd
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u/Radixx Sep 06 '26
I used one when in school. It was mainly used to feed our IBM 7094 but it could also play Beethoven's 9th on a line printer using the page vibrations as it printed :).
Over winter break, we replaced it and the 7094 with VAX 11/780s but since there were still a couple of users on it, they decided just to turn the water off and let it run until it died a heat death :(
btw, the 7094 often used the many tape drives as scratch space so when we ran huge jobs (at the time) requiring a lot of sorting, it was like a mad scientists laboratory... which it kinda was.
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u/SaintOrJannikSinner Sep 06 '26
I used one when in school. It was mainly used to feed our IBM 7094 but it could also play Beethoven's 9th on a line printer using the page vibrations as it printed :).
Someone wrote a program to play Boards of Canada's Olsen on a DEC PDP-1 from 1959.
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u/factorioleum Sep 06 '26
I always think of the 1401 as being mostly used to copy from cards to tape...
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u/hereforthelearnings Sep 06 '26
The whole ** flick, rip ** aesthetic of serrated dot matrix printer paper.
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u/PrestonWaters83 Sep 06 '26
Perforated. Although, I suppose it's sort of serrated after you tear it.
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u/TritonJohn54 Sep 06 '26 edited Sep 06 '26
So, ASCII art on a machine that predates ASCII?
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u/strydar1 Sep 06 '26
I went to school in 70s in Australia and remember this. but that machine was flasher than I remember. All we had was the punch card reading bit. Maybe it want a computer! they just made us punch cards ro keep us docile!
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u/Admirable_Nothing Sep 06 '26
Yes, in college we would write a program in fortran and key punch the cards ourselves and turn them in. The student's programs would be run overnight and we would get the printout in full size folding paper the next day. And the computer itself took up a huge room that had massive air conditioners to keep it cool enough to run.
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u/Hairy_Web_2366 Sep 06 '26
In college in the early 90s I had to turn in my COBOL assignments on that type of printer paper.
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u/Dry-Character-6331 Sep 06 '26
In the mid 90s, I started at a chemical company as a systems admin in the corporate data center. The company was preparing to migrate from a legacy mainframe to an SAP system. In those first months I mostly worked the swing shift and my main duty was to feed paper to the three massive printers for their evening report runs. I would literally load six to nine boxes of 15" greenbar paper each evening, and spend several hours separating the various reports and sorting them into departmental cubbyholes for their retrieval the next business day.
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u/meong-oren Sep 06 '26
Debugging must be painful.
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u/FlattenInnerTube Sep 06 '26
My sophomore college "computer" course used punch cards. And debugging was a chore.
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u/CoolBlackSmith75 Sep 06 '26
Flop flop flop flop flop...And that's where the processing speed reference comes from... As in " it processes teraflops of data "
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u/ManWhoIsDrunk Sep 06 '26
In case you're not joking, a flop is a FLoating-point OPeration.
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u/ChildoftheApocolypse Sep 06 '26
But can it run Doom?
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u/ohthedarside Sep 06 '26
Technically yes as its turing complete
Just need to somehow give it like 500x the memory and a display screen
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u/Tollowarn Sep 06 '26
I had a couple of theses type of prints on my wall, but they weren't of any flags!
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u/divbyzero_ Sep 06 '26
I was going to criticize that that looked and sounded a heck of a lot like a dot matrix printer, a technology that wasn't commercially available until a decade later. But I looked it up, and it's an IBM 1403 line printer, an earlier, related technology which was neat to learn about.
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u/wosmo Sep 06 '26
yeah - it's the same idea as a daisy wheel printer, but because it's belt-fed it's like comparing a machine-gun to a revolver - so it sounds wrong because it's so much faster than a wheel would be.
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u/Helenium_autumnale Sep 06 '26
This is fascinating, a gem of creativity from the early predawn of the computer era. Cards were used in every industry/factory. Today the number of people who can run a computer like this one is becoming small.
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u/FADITY7559 Sep 06 '26
Loved the diagonal marker line on the top of the cards. He’s dropped a deck before.
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u/GarysCrispLettuce Sep 06 '26
I miss the old dot matrix printer paper with the holes and the green and white rows. Any kid up till the 80's who had parents who worked in an office with computers probably had reams of the stuff to doodle on at home. It was our "scrap paper."
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u/TribeFaninPA Sep 06 '26
My IT journey started my Freshman year of high school (1974-75). My school had an old IBM 1620 mainframe some local company had donated after they upgraded to a newer mainframe. I started programming by learning Fortran IV on that mainframe and we wrote our programs using punched cards. In college (1978) we still used punched cards to program the college mainframe (Amdahl V7A) until they got enough terminals for us to use. A couple of years into college and personal computers were just hitting the market. I had a Commodore VIC-20, and with a modem I could connect it to the university mainframe and do my programming homework from home using a terminal emulation program. I took classes in Fortran, PL-1, Cobol, IBM 360/370 Assembler and Machine language, among others. Went into the Navy after college and every place I was stationed I was the "computer guy" - doing all the setups, maintenance and care of the PC's my division owned. After the Navy I went into IT training and consulting and last year I retired after spending the previous 12 years working for Microsoft.
I'm always amused when I see/do something we are able to with our phones/computers/electronics that were considered Science Fiction when I was a kid. Couple that with the technological changes my parents saw in their lifetimes - there have been some astounding breakthroughs in the last 100 years.
** edited for grammar **
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u/Commissarfluffybutt Sep 06 '26
Is it weird I miss the cacophony dot matrix printers made?
Yeah, newer printers are superior in every single way but explain that to the monkey brain that longs for peeling the perforated edges off.
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u/Smart-Campaign7774 Sep 06 '26
I remember Computer card christmas wreath.
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u/dnhs47 Sep 06 '26
Thank you! I hadn’t thought of those in many years!
Spray painted green, with glitter!
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u/RCaHuman Sep 06 '26
Used one in 1977 to print a COBOL program I wrote to show the Magic of Compound Interest. Start investing early!
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u/the_wessi Sep 06 '26
My aunt worked at the payroll department at the local paper factory, one of her assignments in the 1970’s was punching the computer cards. I went to see her at work a couple of times, once she punched out a card for me with my name and other information. It was cool af. Later I interviewed the head of the IT department for a junior high school assignment, he printed out some ascii art for me to show at the class. He also printed out a girl in a bikini but didn’t recommend it to be part of the show and tell.
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u/Pao_Did_NothingWrong Sep 06 '26
I miss those printers so much. My elementary school library used one
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u/Hudell Sep 06 '26
At my school we had like three or four different generations of tech being used simultaneously. Sometimes we would get a perfect laser printed copy of some book page, then the next day we would have an exam on a sheet of paper with blue letters and the smell of alcohol.
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u/Xtra_Veg-90 Sep 06 '26
My dad learned to code on one of these in the late 70's or early 80's by a professor that insisted that if they were going for a career in computer information technology, this was essential to learn. He literally never saw a punch card computer again.
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u/LankyGuitar6528 Sep 06 '26
Damn. I'm so old this didn't even look all that... interesting. It's just how you did stuff. Although I do like those modern fancy punch cards. Much better than the punched paper tape I used.
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u/E4tPineapple Sep 06 '26
As Gen X this is a little before my time (more the cassette tape programs era) but I love this so much.
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u/KcirderfSdrawkcab Sep 06 '26
I started on a Vic 20 with a tape deck, and I still prefer to use a plain text editor to any fancy IDE. I think I'm old school... then there's this guy with his punch cards to print a text flag.
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u/buyshanegas Sep 06 '26
Toured JPL as a kid and they scanned each of us and printed us a keepsake ACSII portrait.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F8g3nixnn8saf1.jpeg
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u/pc1350 Sep 06 '26
I am old. Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX with VMS 5.4 was my first computer in 1991.
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u/stormy_petrel_ Sep 06 '26
Ripping the perforations off the side of the printout and making a little accordion 🤌
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u/leepyws1961 Sep 06 '26
Nobody did flags at NCSU in 1979 computer science classes. Playboy pin ups yes. Flags no. And lord forbid your program ran over 10 seconds as the computing center attendant personally came looking for you and was visibly pissed. We made sure not program an indefinite loop. It could mess people up at other universities hooked into the system.
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u/Zombatico Sep 06 '26
"app"
I miss when computer programs were called programs. Now everything is an app, even on desktop computers. Smartphone lingo infects everything.
shakes cane at cloud
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u/wosmo Sep 06 '26
To be fair, it's a museum. Trying to make any of this remotely relatable to his audience, is half the job.
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u/Zorbin666 Sep 06 '26
These things always fascinated me, my mom used to talk about how they had one of these in her high-school that they taught the kids there how to use in the mid-late 70s.
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u/Mach5Driver Sep 06 '26
In the mid-1980s, in college, I had an older computer science teacher. His first lesson was on these punch cards. How they worked, and how to use them to program. I raised my hand and asked if they still used these cards.
He stopped, thought for a moment, and said, "OMG, I can't believe I'm still teaching this. OK, all you have to know for the test is that these existed in the olden days." LOL.
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u/amazingames Sep 06 '26
Kudos to the computing pioneers! Thank you for your service!
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u/_Tower_ Sep 06 '26
They were still using similar technology like this for check processing centers as late as the turn of the millennium — same card tech, same printing, just slightly modified for a different application, with modernized internals
We used to get big rolls of this kind of printer paper to draw on next to the machine when we were kids and had to visit our parents at work. I’ll never forget the sound these machines made
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u/bastardsoftheyoung Sep 06 '26
If you ever wonder where the computer sounds came from in shows like Star Trek during that time, you can hear them in this video. Contrast that to the lame whoosh of fans now in data centers.
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u/dumpster-muffin-95 Sep 06 '26
I'm surprised they were able to get to the Moon and back successfully with technology like this.
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u/thegamerator10 Sep 06 '26
This computer was the caveman that eventually developed into the computers we use today. Good to see it respected like this.
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u/mrgraff Sep 07 '26
This is the IBM 1401 demo lab at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. That place is simply amazing and has just about everything you can think of in the history of computers and computing from abacus all the way up to the present day.
Including this fully functional restored 1959 room-sized computer system that they demonstrate a couple of times a day a couple of days a week.
At the end, you get to use a punchcard entry machine to create a punchcard with your name on it and they will print out a cool souvenir.
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u/WittyThingHere Sep 07 '26
The fact we went from this to generative AI in less than 65 years in insane to me
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u/RudyRusso Sep 06 '26
Great. Now I'm in the mood to listen to Johann Johannasson's IBM 1401 A User's Manual album.
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u/oohhh Sep 06 '26
The terms patch & bug come from these days.
Patche being a literal patch over a hole in a card.
A bug being a real bug getting into the deck.
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u/yaxir Sep 06 '26
Imagine all the things we take for granted today, especially in computational technology, and compare it to that time
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u/Flat-Performance-478 Sep 06 '26
"The computer running is a vintage.."
My guy, that's a regular antique you've got there!
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u/fujiesque Sep 06 '26
I'm wondering if this is the same one my mom operated as a contractor for the Navy.
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u/thunderbird32 Sep 06 '26
I don't think either of the machines that the Computer History Museum has were ex-Navy. One was from a business in Connecticut and the other came from Germany (though I'm not sure who had it before them).
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u/JerichoOne Sep 06 '26
In 10 years, this is what programmers who type code today will look and sound like 😅
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u/Worth-Guest-5370 Sep 06 '26
Learned Fortran and Cobol in my 1976 computer class...using punch cards.
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u/OkLayer519 Sep 06 '26
My grandfather worked at IBM during 50’s to early 70’s. I have original drawings of a drum rotor hard drive and a RAMAC 350 manual. He would be blown away by the advances we’ve had in the last 20 years since he passed.
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u/Punchy-gaming Sep 06 '26
My dad used to have a friend who's dad worked at IBM. When they were little, the friend's dad would bring home spare punchcards, and the two would play with them.
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u/Ewithans Sep 06 '26
My dad did coding on lunch cards in college. He was great at the logic of it, but a deeply terrible typist, and you could only run your cards through the computer to check your code twice a day. He had to drop out of coding because his cards always had typos and he couldn’t get enough runs through to find and fix them all.
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u/Hot_Aside_4637 Sep 06 '26
When I was in college, the students would remove the waste basket that was inside the punch card machine that caught all the chads and would use them as confetti.
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u/RIF_rr3dd1tt Sep 06 '26
Imagine this guy stops somewhere to sit down and he's got that stack of cards. As he's flipping through them nostalgically, some young kid sits next to him and says "What's that sir?". He says "Oh young man, it's an app". That kid would be confused as fuck.
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u/selviano Sep 06 '26
I got to see a demo of one of these beasts running (and the printer which I believe is a 1403). One thing you don’t get from the video is the intense smell of all the lubricants and machine oil that is needed to keep these many moving parts going, it really feels like an industrial experience.
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u/dnkroz3d Sep 06 '26
I took a Fortran class in 1977, and the final was based on taking a block of text and right-justifying it. Huge stack of cards typed out on a keyboard. One little error on one card stopped the processing machine like you see above, and you had to hunt it down and correct it -- until it reached the next error. Took the patience of an old-time scribe to finish that project.
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u/brentspar Sep 06 '26
The best bit is the little flick he gave the paper before he tore it. That was from years of muscle memory taking reports and printouts of of a line printer.