For Duers under 55: What is this?

[pokerfan]

[ccharles000]

1. A mini belt of some sort I would guess.

[qnr]

2. Baudot code on a teletype tape?

Edit: Well, not baudot... IIRC that was 5-bit. - that looks 7 or 8-bit, depending upon parity, so it's more likely punched tape for a computer.

[pokerfan]

3. I would have accepted

any form of computer punched tape. I had a little bit of it all at college: punched tape, punched cards, 8 inch floppies, etc.

[qnr]

4. I've used it too, but not often - as opposed to my years of using tape on the TTYs, so I get

confused easily :)

[pokerfan]

5. When I was a freshman

I had to write out my code longhand and then reserve time at the cardpunch. Then key my code onto paper cards, which took an hour or so. Then hand my stack of cards to a technician behind a counter. Then wait a couple of hours for "my job" to be processed. Then return to the counter and accept delivery of "my job" in the form of folded sheets of paper. Then I would be informed of all my syntax errors.

It's a wonder anyone learned to program under such conditions.

(It got better as a sophomore as then I had access to the department's minicomputer.)

[qnr]

6. I've heard the horror stories. I never had much in the way of time-sharing, my access was

either to my personal, or military computers that I had direct access to.

[pokerfan]

7. It got better

by the time I was a Junior it was all terminal based. I could dial in from home. Sounds like no big deal today but it was pretty head stuff for the seventies. I caught the tail end of keypunch at college the same way I caught the tail end of slide rules in high school. But I'm glad I did. I think slide rules give you an intuitive appreciation for numbers that calculators and matlab simply can't.

[qnr]

8. I agree. I used to love my slide rules. Keypunching - whee! Also, I can remember

when my fingers had callouses from flipping toggle switches on the PDP-11/70

[MajorChode]

10. Been there, done that

Some smart feller actually had a roll of teletype paper tape that would draw a picture of a nude woman on the teletype using only text characters. I often thought that whoever took the time to assemble those cards must have been the most hard up guy on the planet.

[Rabrrrrrr]

9. You bastard! That's a nude picture of me! How dare you post that!

Yes, I was one of the earliest arpanet porn stars.


Embarrassing. I had such huge sideburns.

[MajorChode]

11. I actually used those at work many years ago

One time I asked one of the new guys to go fetch me a box of parity bits. He asked around for a while, much to the amusement of everyone, until one of my detractors cut the bottom out of a matchbox and filled it up with the dots left over from the tape writer. When I slid the matchbox open all the bits spilled out into my lap and the joke was on me.