When PC Still Means 'Punch Card'

ricst writes: "The New York Times reports that there are stll many applications that use punchcards. "Use what?", you say. Slashdotters not yet in their dotage may have never seen these 80 column Hollerith field cards, or the clunky machines that are still used to punch holes in them. And let's not forget the bizarre JCL (Job Control Language) that's needed to be at the front of the deck. Well... turns out many companies still use them, with slight modifications (like the airlines that print a magnetic strip on them)."

Re:Use JCL to stop junk mail (postal)?

[Mong0]

When submiting a job with JCL the are different control parmaters that can be set. One is your SYSIN which depending on the type of job you are running could be anything from input dataset name to where your ouput of the system dump if you program blows.

Re:What's so different about this and...

[Anonymous Coward]

Bollocks. Magnetic card readers/writers have been readily available for years.

//SYSIN DD *

[rogueroo]

The '//SYSIN DD *' flags the following lines as "in-stream" control statements. These control statements provide the ability to modify the default execution of the program as called on the previous EXEC statement.

It's been less than six hours since I've fscked around with JCL :)

Re:Are you old enough to remember..

[stnls_steel_mouse]

Heck, I'm old enough to remember when the Alpha Operator in the computer room was the guy who could pick up a whole stack of punch cards out of the tray to load into the reader in one shot as opposed to taking several baby hand-fulls one at a time.

You had to press the stack together hard enough so that they would not slip and fall to the floor, but not so hard that the stack would buckle and explode in your face.

Mind you, this is also why you would take a marker and run a diagonal stripe down the top of the stack of cards so that if you dropped them you could get the 400 - 600 cards of the run deck back in order. Sequence numbers! We don' need no stinkeen sequence numbers!

Of couse the real benefit of working as a third-shift tape ape in an old fashioned mainframe shop was that you could keep a six-pack of beer cold under the raised floor and drink as the register lights flickered and the tape drives spun.

As to the fellow who spewed blood seeing JCL and Java on the same screen: happens to me every day at my current assignment.

Old dog learning new tricks!

JCL 'n' Java

[rogueroo]

A project currently underway with my employers is to take data from a web input form and use it in a batch program on the mainframe. The web server runs under UNIX System Services. Java applications have been written to parse the input data, reformat it, and to pass that data to the OS/390 batch JCL.

I don't know a whole lot about the Java side of things -- I'm responsible for the UNIX System Services and OS/390 system environment.

I guess what I'm saying is I don't seem to have this blood loss problem.

Re:Seen them!? Photo of card reader and keypunch

[texchanchan]

Here's a pic of the machine that read them: card reader [chanchan.net] (the massive thing in the foreground). And, a keypunch [chanchan.net], with cabinets for punch cards off to the right; and my favorite pic from the era, the DEC-10 in the dark [chanchan.net] (a long exposure). Used to turn the lights out and watch those register indicators or whatever they were.

Magtape Write-rings were cool toys too.

[billstewart]

The 9-track magnetic tape technology let you write-protect or write-enable tapes by inserting or removing a plastic ring that the tape-readers checked for before writing. There were usually lots of spare write-rings around any computer shop, because you'd remove them from backup tapes you were archiving so nobody'd overwrite them. They were great toys for little kids (good to grab or chew on), and also made good cat-toys.

Re:Engineering uses

[Anonymous Coward]

"Taping out" does not refer to delivering a design on mag tape. It refers to making a mask with black tape on a giant room-sized sheet of plastic.

See page 851 of the "Art of Electronics" (2d ed) for a cool picture. I was unable to find on online.

Re:Non-Volatile Memory

[dvdeug]

Ever wonder why hex FF never gets a printable character?

Hex 7F (all holes punched in a 7 bit system) doesn't get a printable character, at least not in ASCII. But FF is a printable character in a lot of character sets - Latin 1 has ÿ in that spot.