Programming with Punch Cards [pdf] (opens in new tab)

> More than one box was awkward for a guy (or gal – we had lots of women programmers) to carry around.

Good ol' days :-)

A college girlfriend (Washington State University., class of '78) was in chemical engineering and had to take a semester of programming (back then Comp. Sci. was a subdivision of the math department). I spent many an evening with her, helping her punch cards and waiting for output. I managed to steal a few cards to use for bookmarks and still find them around here and there.

At my university the CS department didn't like us, economic students, so they stuck us in the basement, aka the museum.

So I got to do all my econometrics labs with Fortran, C and BASH shell on a real Unix system. But first I had to learn to punch card! Write the program on paper, debug as much as possible by hand. Punch en entire deck of cards. Bring the box over to the lab technician to load them. (don't drop the box on the floor...) Wait for the tape to be loaded to live memory. Go to a teletype terminal, run my program.

I'm not that old, but this somehow made me feel old.

I am the proud owner of one blank punch card. I found it inside one of my old college textbooks - I must have been using it as a page mark.

This is truly a wonderful story! I wish I could try to use punch cards someday.