I will save that for another story sometime.īack to the school story…The students in the 300-500-level courses were the ones that got access to the terminals. If any readers know where I can find a keypunch machine, please let me know! I have a project that needs a hand punch or a full keypunch machine. The most common of these manifestations is the Hollerinth punch card. I am still completely fascinated with all things related to the physical implementation of digit representation. I still occasionally work with systems that use the arcane JES2 interface that represents the vestige of that punch card/remote printout legacy. The cards themselves are all gone, but the software ‘mechanics’ still remain. For many mainframe computers today, the card punch system is still emulated in software. What is astounding is that the basics for this are still in use. I was taking courses that used the RJE station to enter Hollerinth cards to the computers that handled one job at a time and submitted these to a system “far away” for placement into the queue to be executed. The best part? I was not even supposed to use the terminals. I do not particularly like or excel at mathematics and, as a freshman, I had little discipline and took all of my lab money and spent it going to the library and quietly playing Star Trek on the terminals. Almost all of the courses assumed an interest in mathematics and focused primarily on software development (specifically teaching computer languages). Computer Science was a brand new field in college at that time and was comingled into most Mathematics curriculum. So much so that I let my scholastic work lapse by focusing only on computer science courses. I became infatuated with computer and programming. When I went to college in 1975 I gave up one obsession, music, and picked up another. It is hard to imagine that happening today. Such were those last few years of the work world where someone without a college degree could get a job as a software developer without a college degree. I went to Wayne State in Detroit (Go Tartans!) and had to later go back to school to get my degree. I suppose that some would say I am in good company with that kid with the glasses who dropped out of Harvard. I have a small confession regarding my life in computers and the positive and maybe negative (?) impact that it has had on me. Keith Moore, the AML‘s donor for our beloved Vectrex game console (as well as a number of other valuable vintage computers) kindly wrote in with this story about the Vectrex and his life in computing since the mid-1970s, the era of the punch card.
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