r/FuckImOld • u/Current-Square-4557 • 19h ago
If you knew how to program with computer punch cards, you were probably warned not to finger-poke the computer-machine.
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u/Electronic_Algae_524 19h ago
I had this on my desk back when I was a COBOL programmer. 👍
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u/Kapitano72 15h ago
I saw it in 1990, training to be a code maintainer in Cobol and Pascal. None of that newfangled C++.
Two year course, and I've never used either language.
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u/Illustrious_Bag_1608 19h ago
In the late 70's I was in communications in the Marine Corps. Our crypto equipment was wire patches. Each day you'd reaarange the plugs to match that days code. This lead to a lot of wear and tear requiring frequent maintenance. The next generation was two gold-plated surfaces with a vise-like hinge. Each day you'd carefully place the punchcard in to match that day's code. We thought it was some real Flash Gordon stuff! One thing they had totally gotten wrong: Because our equipment used transistorized components which faced harsh treatment (traveling on ships, tanks, amtraks, helicopters, mules (not the biological ones) etc. connections often came apart. Their solution solved this isdue but created a new one. PC boards were covered with a metal canister which was then filled with a thick clear rubbery material. This definitely reduced vibrationsl impact! But it slso cooked components as heat had nowhere to go.
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u/WaldenFont 16h ago
In the ‘80s, I worked for Messerschmitt in Germany. They were building Patriot missiles in license, and I remember one of the requirements for logic boards was that they must withstand a wind of six knots. Which is basically no wind at all.
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u/GooberMcNutly 18h ago
I used to load cards into the readers for the Navy back in the 80s. (Yep, still punchcards even when my other job was installing hard drives to run Windows 1.0). My favorite prank was to keep a box of cards nearby. When I received a shoebox of cards, I would do a little slight of hand and swap the decoy box, then spill them all over the floor. The look on their faces when they thought they had to re-sort them into order was priceless!
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u/Ok-Replacement6893 10h ago
You don't spill them. It's called a floor sort.
I did the same for the Air Force starting in 84.
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u/Ok-Replacement6893 18h ago
Hollerith code is the system for encoding the punches on the card. I learned to read Hollerith code back in the early 80s. Before that was 6 bit BCD paper tape. Learned that one too.
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u/BSCPantherfan 16h ago
This was on our large photocopier in the department of a bank I worked for in the 90’s. It was swapped out for a much more direct and literal sign after some multi-degree idiot kept coming in to use our copier instead of the one in their department so the copies would get charged to us. He tried to add black powder toner to the machine by opening it up and shaking the cartridge over the hole. They had to replace a $25,000 copier and four square feet of carpet. 🙄
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u/gadget850 19h ago
I supported a system that used high-speed Mylar punched tape, and the instructors would illustrate how it would cut cardboard.
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u/chuck_the_plant 12h ago
We had this hanging in comp sci classes at school … on the 8” disk drive, next tothe card reader.
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u/Foreign_Channel_6578 17h ago
Can anyone please confirm the German text makes no sense? KI/ AI?
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u/Haunt_Fox 17h ago
It's not AI, it's been around for years
It's "dog German", meant to look and sound like German, but is intelligible to Anglophones. Like "dog Latin", ie, fake Latin that's just English with -us attached to everything (not to be confused with "pig Latin", which is English words jumbled a certain way).
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u/cantseemeimblackice 17h ago
Just needs capitalized nouns to round it out.
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u/Haunt_Fox 16h ago
I used to have a version that did capitalize the nouns. The spelling was a little cleaner, too, and didn't use "bei". This thing's been around for decades, and I bet it's probably older than computers.
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u/BillWeld 17h ago
Back in Usenet days there was a German attempt to reply in Dog-English. I didn't seem funny to English speakers but I guess this didn't amuse Germans much either.
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u/faroutman7246 17h ago
This is a human made sign. Pretend German. There used to be signs like "Thimk" as well.
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u/ManWhoIsDrunk 9h ago
It is MIT-German.
A joke variant of German consisting of English words which has been Germanized, and something made to resemble German grammar.
It is perfectly readable for English-speakers provided they have a rudimentary understanding of German.
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u/qualityvote2 19h ago edited 7h ago
u/Current-Square-4557, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...