Are You A Lefty?

[Chaz]

Ah for the good old days when I had to load a data base by typing it on a 35ASR to create a punch tape, then load it through a tape reader on the computer.

I typed and sent many messages on the Model 40 teletype with a punch tape. Then we had to save the tapes if we needed to resend it later. Not as bad as the Silent 700 with the 2 cassette tapes used to record and send msgs.

 

[Drag0n]

yes, the days of error correction being when the stack of punch cards is done, you draw a black line from the top left to the bottom right along the side of the stack in case you dropped the cards in route to the reader. And the LPD daemon returning "printer is on fire" when a jam was detected was not figurative as the heat from the drum in a jam would catch the paper on fire!

 

[Coss]

yes, the days of error correction being when the stack of punch cards is done, you draw a black line from the top left to the bottom right along the side of the stack in case you dropped the cards in route to the reader. And the LPD daemon returning "printer is on fire" when a jam was detected was not figurative as the heat from the drum in a jam would catch the paper on fire!

According to your profile, you're only 47 so you were born in 1969; how do you know about this?
Because I remember doing it when I first started out in Computers in 1967.

 

[Drag0n]

According to your profile, you're only 47 so you were born in 1969; how do you know about this?
Because I remember doing it when I first started out in Computers in 1967.

Several reasons. My father was a data analyst. I served in the army (where all tech takes years to die out after obsolescence) and having been around tech my entire life, working for several companies that tended to keep their antiquated tech around like a badge of honor. I personally started with apple II's in school, and commodore 64 at home and going in to the office with my dad to help him load tape on the mainframes to run overnight jobs. You will notice I never said I was the one doing it, I just know about it.
I come from the days when data compression meant notching out the 5 1/4 in floppy so you could use the other side of the disk.

My personal favorite story was working for Hayes when we get a call up from a hacker farmer (I don't know what else to call him ) asking about how to hook his modem up to his cow.
Seems Bessie was preggers, and supposedly, when a cow goes into labor, the body temp elevates above a certain temp. He had a thermistor set to that temp and needed to know the pin-outs on his modem to set to high for the modem to auto-dial the pre-programed hotline for the main house so she could tell the farmer that "it was time".