On Mon, 14 Feb 2005 17:40:22 -0500 (EST)
William Donzelli <aw288_at_osfn.org> wrote:
> > I bought a few boxes (10,000 cards or so) for notes, mixing glue,
> > etc. Ed Grothus has a cubic cubit -- really -- of unused,
> > private-labelled but ordinary, 80 col cards. Maybe more. It's
> > easily millions of cards. Enough to kill us all.
>
> An IBM 2520 would eat that many in a week or so...
>
> ...and thats a slow puunch...
>
> William Donzelli
> aw288_at_osfn.org
>
>
When my father programmed the IBM 650, there was no input or output from
the machine except punched cards. The programmer would have his program
punched, line by line, onto the source card deck. The
'compiler/assembler' would be read into the 650's core from a deck of
cards. The assembler/compiler, now loaded into core, would be run and
would read in the source deck and punch out an object deck. Then the
object deck would be moved from the cardpunch 'out' bin to the reader
'in' bin and loaded into core to run.
Each pass of the compiler/assembler would eat up another pile of cards
to make the new 'object' deck. So by necessity, the 650 would eat up a
large quantity of cards just in the programming/debug process.
This is all repeated from what my father told me a number of years ago.
Anybody who remembers details otherwise please feel free to correct me.
-Scott
Received on Mon Feb 14 2005 - 17:02:45 GMT