A bloody big new SD card from Sandisk

[ronin6]

One of my mother's first jobs was as a punch card operator .

[TazManiac]

One of my mother's first jobs was as a punch card operator .

Pops. while leaving behind a career as an Engineer on the Stanford Linear Accelerator (he worked on the 'Trigger'), and in in his spare time creating a Union damn'd near from scratch, would work code on the Punch Card based Time Share, that was state of the art back in the late 60's, early 70's.

He'd get these enormous stacks of Punch Cards and it was my brother's and I's task to load them in the reader ("I'm Helping!" ) before they'd compile or otherwise 'Run' and then it would produce this dense stack of wide, continuous-feed, print-out that he would then take home to debug.

Turns out Evil Management didn't even twig to the info available from their own data, but Pops used it to negotiate a fair shake for the otherwise unrepresented folks who toiled to make the place function.

And now, people Tweet all day...

[Dave]

One of my mother's first jobs was as a punch card operator .

One of my first (paying) jobs was as a punch card operator. I'd been doing it for free, for some years before that.

How many people here can remember the smell of oily chad from the Teletype ASR 33 paper-tape punch? I had more than a bit of that stuff (round bits) as well as Hollerith-card chad (stiffer, sharp-cornered, rectangular bits) end up in my hair during my high-school years. There was so much of it around that it seemed a real shame not to use it as confetti!

When I finally entered college, I was given a timesharing account that had the glorious standard allocation of 50 granules (25 kilobytes) of disk storage space... and this had to be enough for my freshman-year projects. These days you need more than that to write a decent README.TXT document.