re: #200 Mich-again

I remember FORTRAN punch cards in College. Ugh.

I’m a big fan of the whole Bubble Memory slice of electronics history. We had so many of those cards and I never remember one failing. Incredibly reliable. I think you could dunk one in a bucket of water and it would work after it dried out. There are still quite a few in use in Industry BTW. But no one would ever make them again, so the people who need them hoard them.

I am well aware of that technology. Unfortunately, nostalgia doesn’t work.

I have a funny story to tell you. This is back in the ’70s. Penn State Comp Cntr.. Unlike many universities, the cards were free for the taking. 2000 to a box. You put your name and univ. acct # on the box and stowed the boxes on the shelving provided. I had a friend, Mike, who was a physics major working on a project for his Ph.D. Someone else thought his project was a threat to his own project. So he stole all Mike’s cards. As I was the one key-punching all Mike’s data onto the cards I knew exactly what he had and I knew when those boxes went missing. Campus Police - aka Keystone Kops - were notified. They got back to Mike about 2 weeks later with the results of their investigation.

The cards were the property of the university, as Mike had not paid for them. The only thing Mike personally owned were the holes I had punched into them, and they really weren’t sure if Mike owned them or I did, as I was the one who actually punched those cards. And frankly, they didn’t know how to track down holes.

No joke.

Fortunately, I kept duplicates of all my clients work under my own name and account so he was able to recover everything.