Fun with punched cards... and other recollections...

[sur-behoffski <sur_behoffski@...>]

For a while, when I was still an undergraduate (not sure exact year),
programs had to be submitted using punch cards, and the cards, along
with the printout with the results, was available in an output shelf.

There were a couple of punch-card machines that were available for
students to type out their own text.

One day, as a bit of fun, I typed out an entire deck of playing cards:

     TWO OF SPADES
     THREE OF SPADES

     ...

     JACK OF HEARTS
     QUEEN OF HEARTS
     KING OF HEARTS
     ACE OF HEARTS

Sadly, I don't recall ever using them in an actual game of anything.
Also, to a mild extent, they were "marked cards", at least to anyone
who could read the punched-out positions on the back of a card
(reverse-Hollerith, perhaps?)

I suspect, also, that I forgot to type out a Joker (or two).

--

Ironically, I started with optical-mark cards while in high school,
long before I ever saw my first punch card, by using computers via
the Angle Park Computing Centre.  I was even a member of PSI!  That's
why my very first programming language was APL.

[Obligatory, oblique link to Lua:  The Centre had a software-only
"Turtle graphics" packages, and, later on, had a real-life hardware
Turtle that you could watch executing the program.  I found out later
that the Turtle Graphics programming framework was implemented in
Lisp... and the creators of Lua acknowledge an emerging influence of
Scheme feeding into language structure and features over time...]

--

I believe that I still have cards from both eras, but, at the moment,
it would take some serious tidying-up of layers of cruft that have
accumulated on top of the storage box, to see exactly what I have.

cheers,

sur-behoffski
programmer, Grouse Software