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[ARSCLIST] ^ Re: [ARSCLIST] Telemetry Tapes
Ya know all that still happens inside our present day computers -
although the cards are invisible and the timing much faster! I can just
imagine when computers have matured a bit more, in say fifty or a
hundred years, and they work at the speed of thought and dreams... and
will take input instantaneously instead of sequentially or even
parallel. I can feel it when my PC spills the cart even today...
(Told you I was wierd!)
(and I'm not a programmer so not hitched to the old ways)
Oh, and one would hope all those cards in the basement did not get
flooded!
Dreaming on,
<L>
Lou Judson • Intuitive Audio
415-883-2689
On Aug 15, 2006, at 9:35 PM, steven c wrote:
I had my first tentative contact with (a very tentative) IT back in
1961!
I was working for a small insurance company, which had a "computer" to
calculate its premiums and print the notices. This took, all told,
about
four large grey machines, one of which was "the computer" itself...and
that one was "programmed" by plugging a collection of jumpers (with
banana
plugs at each end) into a board with a hundred or so holes. My task was
running 80-column "IBM cards" through a sorter as many times as there
were
columns in the items to be sorted...and then taking the sorted cards,
placed in order in a large wheeled cart, over to the people who fed
them into "the computer" in carefully sorted order. On bad days,
somebody
managed to knock the rack of sorted cards over en route...
However, I suspect that was a lot faster than the predecessor method of
using a handwritten ledger (which were still stored, as were all the
cards,
in the basement of their building!) to manually type each premium
notice...