Talk Like A Duck

Tale #1

When I was an undergraduate, I used to spend all my free-time (and much of my non-free time) at the University computer center. There was a large room for student use with keypunch machines on the walls and worktables in the center.

One of my friends was a graduate student who was working on a team writing an Algol compiler as a term project. They had broken down into teams, lexical analysis, parser, code generation ,etc. They were in the middle of integration.

The “source code control system” was a large punch card box. For those who haven’t seen them these are long corrogated cardboard boxes which hold a big stack of cards and have a lid hinged in the back.

The team was making a series of debugging runs, they would take turns carrying the box to the room with the card reader and offer the contents to the god in the mainframe as their latest ‘sacrifice.’ When the listing came back, they would spread it out on the table and figura out what to do next.

This wasn’t ‘pair’ programming, it was ‘septet’ programming.

I was sitting at a nearby table helping another student with a homework assignment, and glancing occasionally at the compiler team.

The guy with the card box came back from the reader to see his team-mates vigoursly discussing something they had seen in the last run. He was carrying the box in front of him, his fingers wrapped around the bottom, and his thumbs holding the lid down. He walked up to the table gaining interest in the discussion. As he leaned over the table, he absent-mindedly rotated his wrists and relaxed his thumbs!

They spent the next hour or so trying to ‘revert’ the deck from the last listing.

Thank God that today we’ve got cheap hard-disks and subversion!

Tale #2

Same time frame and place.

Tom was another graduate student friend. He was an older guy who had come back to school after spending some time in the trenches in Texas. Back in the early 1970s there was lots of data processing done by what IBM called “Unit Record Shops.” Tome had worked in one before coming to graduate school.

In IBM parlance a punched card was a unit record since the file record (I guess we’d call it a row in SQL these days) and the physical unit, the card, were one and the same.

Unit record shops, didn’t have computers, which in those days were investments on the order of a million dollars, give or take an order of magnitude or two. They did everything with decks of punchcards and machines which sorted, collated, or printed them. These machines were ‘programmed’ by connecting holes in plugboards with wires.

Tom said that once he’d accompanied his boss to a trade show. The boss, like many others, didn’t have a really good grasp of the technology his business used.

The boss saw Tom on the show floor and told him, “Tom, come here, you’ve got to see this!”

He led Tom to a booth where a “booth babe” was loading a rainbow-colored stack of cards into the input hopper of a machine, and pushing the start button at which point the machine put all the blue cards in one slot, the yellow cards in another, and so forth.

Tom couldn’t figure out why the boss was so impressed, surely he’d seen sorting machines before. After all they has several of them at work.

Then the boss showed his hand.

Tom, I’ve seen lots of fancy machines in my day, but this is the first one I’ve ever seen that could sort by color!

Even today, it’s too easy to create demos with lots of flash and no substance.