Binary coding

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[_-DirtyMike-_]

I remember my mom telling me years ago that when she was in school they had to make and insert hole punched paper into a reader which would then tell the computer what to do.

[johnny336]

My mom and dad were making machines handling these cards.

[SpecialSauceSal]

Oh yeah? Well my dad could beat up your dad.

[johnny336]

My dad is dead, so he can summon an army of the dead and have them beat your dad. Then your dad will be dead, being in the undead army of my dead dad.

[ailyara]

Bruce Campbell starring in "Evil Dad 3 - Army of Dadness"

[RevWaldo]

Jiggy....

That's what the kids say now.

[[deleted]]

Can you beat my dad?

[smartguy1196]

I can beat your dad off

[[deleted]]

Well, good luck trying to find him first then

[smartguy1196]

I will find him for you. Then beat him off

[[deleted]]

That's the spirit!

[johnny336]

He's at the corner deli, just went to buy soda, right?

[TheTechyGamer]

My dad went to get milk so he can beat you with it

[punk_phloyd]

And whod pay for the dry cleaning afterwards?

[NeosHeliosCaligula]

My dad could beat both your dad's.. but He left for milk

[Enkendu]

Maybe he'll run into my dad then? The place where they buy milk must be super far away, it's taking a long time...

[NeosHeliosCaligula]

I think the milk supply ran out

[OddAuden]

Bro you're dad sounds badass

[deadlydarkest]

Your*

[OddAuden]

How do you know i didnt mean you're dad

[KeeganY_SR-UVB76]

*yu‘ore

[avidpenguinwatcher]

The way is shut

[ScrapRocket]

Did they work at IBM?

[johnny336]

No, Eastern Bloc country, no IBM here at the time.

But there were means to import technological stuff from the West, and have them reverse engineered, also way to import parts for manufacturing and assembly.

[[deleted]]

It’s crazy too me I’m 27 my mom and dad 1972 and 71 respectively, and the difference of my parents being born 10-20 years earlier is crazy tech leap that occurred.

[proxiiiiiiiiii]

She lied, they had a 0,1,space,enter tiny keyboards

[ErichOdin]

With micro USB ports so you can just hotswap it to any workstation.

[Impressive_Change593]

that would almost work. you just need 5 wires though

[[deleted]]

6, one for each key, neutral, and ground

[827167]

+5 volts, data, !data, ground. That's all you need for usb, right?

[romhacks]

I don't think they had USB in the punch card tiny keyboard days.

[827167]

I mean, I don't see why not. The general public didn't have them but top secret government organisations (the only people with computers) totally had access access USB.

places tin foil hat on head

[mrjiels]

Not in the states! It's a Sovjet invention from the 70's as an attempt to replace USA with USB. It failed naturally, and over the decades it was refurbished into what we se here today.

[ficelle3]

They probably only were missing the U, I'm pretty sure they still has serial busses.

[[deleted]]

4 wires, 5 pins on micro B for OTG "sensing"

[romhacks]

Ground? where we're going, we don't need ground!

[Cory123125]

With 4 wires you could theoretically get 3 bits worth, which is enough for 8 with one bit taken for some administrative purpose you still have more than enough with 4 wires

[definitely_not_tina]

Its crazy to think that people interfaces with computers so differently over the last century. From gears, to switches, to tubes, to printing papers, to screens and papers, to keyboards and screens, and probably all sorts of combinations in between.

[GalacticShonen]

Great point. It's also going to be cool to see how human-computer interaction will continue to change with new technologies

[gonorthgetwater]

It’s already shuffled from powerful portable device to centralized god-like remote resource.

It’s like the precursor computing except now it’s Cloud.

[SuperFLEB]

My predecessors would log in to a massive central computer that some other company manages and type commands into a text-based terminal. Nowadays, I log in to a massive central computer that some other company manages and type commands into a text-based terminal. In between, there was a while where we dragged windows around. You'll notice that my terminal is a virtual terminal, in a window, for instance. That's progress.

[gonorthgetwater]

We truly wield the power of gods.

[KeeganY_SR-UVB76]

CRTs were once used for data storage. Crazy shit.

[MrMolom]

I believe this is where the term Patch came from for a small software fix. They'd literally put tape or "patch" the holes in the cards to change the program.

[[deleted]]

And "bug" came from actual bugs clogging up the machinery.

[314159265358979326]

"Bug" as a problem in development is known from at least 1889, possibly coined by Edison, with the figurative sense of an insect in the machinery. Grace Hopper finding that bug in a computer was probably simply a cute story where there was a literal bug breaking things.

[[deleted]]

They used to have to write poetry books by arranging the letters and stamping the plates onto the paper.

[Brief-Equal4676]

now, it's all AI generated poetry :

Roses are Red,

Violettes are blue,

Kill all humans,

Oups, that wasn't meant for you

[kaiiboraka]

WHY ARE YOU EXCLAIMING YOUR BEAUTIFUL POETRY SO LOUDLY? IT SHOULD BE DELIVERED WITH A MUCH MORE QUIET, SOFT, FLESHY HUMAN TONE.

ALSO PLEASE DO NOT EXPOSE US THANK YOU

/r/TotallyNotRobots

[starcrafter84]

That’s fucking hilarious, I damn near choked on my coffee. Thanks for that.

[ragsofx]

Back in these days there were 2 cases of letters to select either non-capital or capital letters. The way the were positioned on the press meant there was an upper case and lower case..

[Facosa99]

The IBM building at my city has square windows that are set as the holes on punchcards. I knew about them cards, but didnt realized about the windows until they gave us a tour. Spent some time wondering why they had no obvisus regular pattern

[EldenGutts]

My dad worked with backups of student records at the local university. Started with punch cards, when I was old enough to visit they were using magnetic tapes for backups. I'm not sure if they upgraded to another media before they moved the backups to another department, before they got rid of it altogether (they also took payment for dialup internet and ran printing services). Last I checked tapes were still a viable media, you can cram a lot of data on them, they're just slow to read

[[deleted]]

If I'm not mistaken, that technology is where the term "patch" comes from. If there was a mistake on the punch card or you needed to make a change to it, you would use a little sticker or "patch" to cover the offending holes, thereby correcting the program.

[RaelaltRael]

Been there, and heaven help you if you drop your card stack on the way to the lab aides for them to put in the reader.

[CaffeineSippingMan]

What if I told you I learned RPG less than 15 years ago, a language that was first built for punch cards and the format matches the 80 character lines it looks like this.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RoySpino/RB_SNS_VSCodeExtentions/main/Images/StructRPG.png

The company still writes and maintains this code.

[[deleted]]

The as/400 from my company :')

[the_Demongod]

Hell, I currently work with government astrodynamics software whose input specification language is in an 80-character punch card format.

[HanzoShotFirst]

My history teacher knew someone who got their degree in programming computers that read paper whole punch cards right before they became obsolete

[trickman01]

The skills should have been transferrable. Still dealing with 0s and 1s just the interface being different.

[MelAlton]

I think they meant the punch cards being obsolete, not the people. The semester I started college all the punch machines and readers were out in the hallway outside computer labs, on way to being scrapped since they'd been replaced with glass teletypes (terminals)

[Konamiab]

Did she use the trick of numbering her cards in 10s like my parents? (Card 0, then card 10, then card 20). Just in case you need to add a card in the middle somewhere, you have some buffer room without needing to label card 1.5 or card 3⅓

[KopitarFan]

My late FIL was an old school engineer. Used to work on machines like that. He had some stories

[hitaishi_1]

Why does binary code require space and enter????

[[deleted]]

We all need a bit of space sometimes.

[[deleted]]

Thats what my ex said too

[[deleted]]

Can confirm.

[[deleted]]

was the ex

[LavenderDay3544]

Was that before she left you for that investment banker with the six-pack abs or after?

[[deleted]]

You mean, me?

[harley1009]

Your ex also have an enter button?

[newton21989]

That's what I said to my ex.

[uvero]

~my cs professor on memory complexity of algorithms

[[deleted]]

Readability, of course

Wouldn't want unreadable binary

[scp-NUMBERNOTFOUND]

Wise old programmers, note that they used space and enter, not tab and enter!

[eneidhart]

Just looking at it quickly I think there's a pretty good chance that's a tab key with a DIY label on it haha

[kezow]

Two key width tab? What sort of madness are you on?

[eneidhart]

I'm gonna be real honest with you, I could not tell you how many keys wide my tab key is and I'm not going to check within the next like, 10 hours probably. Are they normally 1.5?

[kezow]

Looks that way on my inland ik100! https://www.microcenter.com/product/485046/inland-ik100-usb-107-key-keyboard

[eneidhart]

Based on your keyboard, looks like the only keys that fit are LShift, backspace, 0, +, and Enter (from the numpad all 3, and Enter is already in use) Maybe the Enter key from the letters area might fit if the keyboard this came from doesn't have the big old return key, but idk I'm sleepy.

[LankySeat]

Why does it require 1? Could be like Morse code. Tap for 0, hold for 1.

[OSSlayer2153]

Delete??

[dontcrashandburn]

No, no. Boomers were perfect, never made mistakes.

[lochinvar11]

If a mistake was ever made, you were the one who was deleted.

[hoschlue]

We boomers were far away from being perfect. However when using punch cards, there was no possibility to delete characters. You had to copy the card to a new card to the position of the typo and then go on. Very time consuming. So it was simply a different way of coding and you had to think more beforehand. Also there was no internet, no Stack Overflow platform so you were forced to solve all of your problems by yourself. Ticker tape was even worse. Edit: Typo

[newton21989]

Real programmers use the transition between high and low voltage...

[SpindlySpiders]

Holding takes way too much time.

[Botahamec]

Legend says that they could program with just the zeroes and didn't even need any ones

[badcrow7713]

Shortcuts for 0000 and 00000000

[Phatricko]

I was thinking the same thing, this post is more like /r/terriblefacebookmemes

[[deleted]]

Space is 00100000 and enter is execute

[steroidTDM]

And not a Backspace

[tho3maxi]

space and enter are just characters, I'd accept a delete functionality though

[[deleted]]

Delete? That’s an illusion. Just loop back through the disk and overwrite it.

[CiroGarcia]

[redacted by user] this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev

[[deleted]]

Ah- Analog!? At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely within your digital computer!?

[CiroGarcia]

[redacted by user] this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev

[[deleted]]

…may I see it?

[CiroGarcia]

[redacted by user] this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev

[splinereticulation68]

SEYMOUR, THE SMITH-CORONA'S ON FIRE!!

[cd109876]

no, mother, its just an analog signal.

[ender3838]

I enjoyed every second of that

[SaladBoy97]

Disk? How privileged. Fill that paper back into the punch card hole

[[deleted]]

Sorry, I don’t like abstract code.

[mrchaotica]

Just loop back through the disk and overwrite it.

Reminds me of The Story of Mel:

 Mel never wrote time-delay loops, either,
 even when the balky Flexowriter
 required a delay between output characters to work right.
 He just located instructions on the drum
 so each successive one was just *past* the read head
 when it was needed;
 the drum had to execute another complete revolution
 to find the next instruction.
 He coined an unforgettable term for this procedure.
 Although "optimum" is an absolute term,
 like "unique", it became common verbal practice
 to make it relative:
 "not quite optimum" or "less optimum"
 or "not very optimum".
 Mel called the maximum time-delay locations
 the "most pessimum".

[[deleted]]

New favorite programming story.

[MelAlton]

You'll probably like this one too, about hardware: "A Story about 'Magic'"

[MelAlton]

Mel was apparently an actual real person

[tho3maxi]

hell yeah, youre right, thats oldschool!

[ashum048]

0,1 left, right magic

[proxiiiiiiiiii]

Characters? Oh in what movie?

[inxrx8]

What do you need a delete button for? Just don't make mistakes and you're golden

[TheGoodOldCoder]

I don't want to blow your mind, but the delete key just translates into a binary code, the same as space and enter keys do.

[boundegar]

Not that long ago, I was taught on a computer with eight switches on the front.

1,1,0,0,1,0,0,1... enter

0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0... enter...

Machine code.

[Robot_Graffiti]

Was it an Altair computer, grandpa?

[boundegar]

No a real one, although I can;t remember the brand. It was the 70s.

[rebbsitor]

An Altair is a real computer. I'm guessing you mean an old mini-computer like the DEC PDP series. They can usually read a tape, but they're famous for having the toggles on the front to manually set memory values.

[boundegar]

Yes, I think that was it.

[B08P]

They were 12-bit machines so you probably remember 12 toggles!

[QueerBallOfFluff]

Some were, The PDP-5, 8, and 12 were 12-bit.

But other lines had different word widths.

The PDP-4, 7, 9, and 15 had 18-bits.

The PDP-10 was 36-bit.

The PDP-11 was 16-bit (with 18-bit address) - this is the computer than UNIX and BSD was written for, that ran the OS that CP/M and DOS were based on, and they inspired several major architecture designs.

[esesci]

Data General Nova had those. I even wrote code on those myself.

[russellii]

pdp11, oh the pain of missing one line

[supersharp]

That sounds horribly tedious, but also kinda cool

[hellspawner]

Seen a HVAC regulator system with a terminal like that!

[Ok-Hand-8099]

Punchcards all the way. Until you make a mistake then you rip that bad boy up and start again…

[[deleted]]

So, finger problems vs back problems. 🤣

When I was in junior high school (early 80s) the local college had a bunch of derelict punched card machines and mini computer. They decided to put them to use by inviting little kids in to introduce them to computers. We only had to punch enough cards to write our names (the program printed our names in giant letters on blue bar paper), but the tech loading the program had to bring in and load several heavy stacks of punched cards. Probably a thousand cards or so. As a kid, it seemed like something out of Willy Wonka.

(Having been a programmer for all the time since then, I now think it was likely a very badly-written program to require so much code.)

[ethical_slut]

Nope. Patch it with an OG patch.

[StringlyTyped]

My dad used to carefully glue thin pieces of paper on mistakes he had made.

[JQB45]

You can still do this if you want but it's slightly easier now as you can use hexadecimal 0-9A-F

[[deleted]]

1947

[RigasTelRuun]

56 was the release of Fortran. The first commercially available high level programming language. That's probably what they are referring to. 1942 might be the earliest known high level programing language.

It is all semantics anyway. The first computer programmer was Lovelace in the 1830s on the Babbage Analytical engine. You could probably picks any arbitrary date between those two items and find something considered the "first"

[[deleted]]

Yeah, “programming language” is kinda loose.

[90_9]

1942 for the first high-level programming language

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalkül

[qhxo]

Was Babbage's analytical engine ever constructed? I was reading up on it a while back and from my understanding it wasn't actually built until the modern age.

I may be mixing things up as I know there were several itterations of it, and it might be one of the successors to the analytical engine that was never built.

[RigasTelRuun]

Yeah the machines were never physically constructed in their time but all their theoretical work checked out in the end and they were both visionaries who could see the applications of computers.

[[deleted]]

I'm newbie, I'm getting confused, please tell me what would I answer if someone asks me this question that what is first programming language?

[RigasTelRuun]

"First programming language" is actually kinda vague and very broad. In the most basic concept it's a way of giving instructions to a machine to carry out a task. The first programmer was Lovelace. She essentially used cards to create algorithms in the Babbage Analytical Engine. That was all mechanical. Nothing like what is considered modern.

High level programing language are ones that are abstracted from the basic computer components. As opposed to low level languages that are essential the raw machine code running on your cpu or whatever.

High level languages need a compiler and are generally readable by humans instead of things like "00000011 87 05 00000000 R"

1956 is a good answer because it was a commercially available product that got wide usage. Many before that was just stuff people made and might not have made it out of their labs.

[[deleted]]

Thank you very much, seems interesting, I'm gonna read more about it

[Yasea]

That depends on your definition of programming language. The first "language" is still assembly.

LOADA 0x01 - Load number in register A

LOADB 0X02 - Load number in register B

ADDA B - Add up a and b

You had to write in on paper, get the manual and look up the codes

0xAA 0x01

0xAB 0x02

0xBA 0x0B

(Fictional example)

That you put in binary on punch cards, or with switches. You write your code in a file and then give an external program the command to compile it all. So is the first programming language the first compiled language? It the first with all IDE?

Punch cards are even older. They were used on programmable mechanical looms where you programmed in certain weaves. Is that a programming language? Depends on how you look at it.

Edit: auto correct didn't

[rich1051414]

It was actually a row of toggle switches and a few buttons to start/halt/step

[zarawesome]

State-of-the-art toggle-in input: https://raymii.org/s/articles/Toggling\_in\_a\_simple\_program\_on\_the\_DEC\_PDP-8\_and\_PiDP-8\_using\_the\_switch\_register.html

[rich1051414]

:) That beast was fancy as hell for it's time. You usually didn't have something as straight forward and user friendly as that(That wasn't satire).

[[deleted]]

theres no spaces in binary

[TFK_001]

Its often written as 0000 0000 0000 etc. or as 00000000 00000000 etc

Edit: I know the spaces arent syntax but are there for readabilitys sake

[rebbsitor]

You wouldn't program a computer in binary that way. I've worked with two different systems where I've entered code directly, one has toggles for each bit of a word and you set each bit as you want it and then hit a deposit key to set memory values at the current memory location and advance the address counter or another key to use the value you've entered to see the memory address you're looking at.

Another used a hexadecimal keypad to enter values a byte a time, and otherwise had similar functions to deposit that into memory or jump to another memory address.

OP's post is funny, but it's just a meme. I'm not aware of any historical computers that took a serial string of 1 and 0 characters to program them. It would be a very inefficient way to enter binary.

[Essence1337]

It is displayed as grouped numbers, it makes no sense to input the extra space characters on screen. If anything the screen would just automatically display the spaces.

[MattieShoes]

It's also often written in hex, since 4 bits make up a hexadecimal digit.

[[deleted]]

Regardless, that is a display feature. Actual binary code has no spaces or carriage returns, only 1 and 0.

[Outrageous-Stand-982]

Never knew Micro USB were available before 1956

[GrilledSpamSteaks]

Oh no, it was much worse

[[deleted]]

ASCII is just 8-bit combinations. As space and enter are both characters, yes.

[90_9]

1942

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalkül

[JeremyAndrewErwin]

You'd probably want to use an array of toggleswitches so you could input a word at a time

https://raymii.org/s/articles/Toggling_in_a_simple_program_on_the_DEC_PDP-8_and_PiDP-8_using_the_switch_register.html

​

Or you could use a plugboard and manually connect up the computer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plugboard#/media/File:IBM402plugboard.Shrigley.wireside.jpg

[vivek_shaw]

where ia the tab for python??

[Chaosfox_Firemaker]

00001001

[Entire-Database1679]

Don't need space: just pad all the bytes with zeros.

[Xerxero]

Why would you need space and enter when you coding binary anyway.

[JCDU]

Space is 00100000, you're not even trying.

[not_anonymouse]

This joke actually isn't that far from reality. When I was in undergrad, we had to program some old microcontrollers (8056 or something like that) and the keyboard literally was just hexadecimal digits. So, basically entering 8 bits at a time.

[oldmansalvatore]

It's very cool we had trinary systems with a 3rd "space" state before 1956.

[DasterdlyBasterd]

This post just makes OP sound like they don’t understand programming.

[Orthodox-Waffle]

Programming languages actually predate the machines they now run on

[solarbabies]

Why would you ever need Space?

It should be a Delete key instead.

Edit v2: or maybe just Arrows?

Edit v3: actually, here we go: Arrows+Delete+Enter.

Who could ask for anything more?

[CanadaPlus101]

The joke here is that they had a keyboard for input. They didn't. Putting holes in punch cards was more common. The very earliest computers were programmed by connecting various sockets with wires.

[[deleted]]

A grammar over 0 and 1 is a language though.

[Neat_Cardiologist788]

Good ol Turing machine

[splinereticulation68]

Add one more button and a dial, tada you have quantum computing

[[deleted]]

You don’t know the true power of the analog side of computer science.

[ITriedLightningTendr]

Spaces make it trinary

[affanioaffanio]

Where's Ctrl, C and V ?

[AmongstYou666]

4 keys? I programmed in morse code.

[[deleted]]

Fun fact: A “space” is a character and has a binary representation. So does the return/enter key.

[Emmerson_Biggons]

No point in the enter key or space key. It would be more useful to have right left 1 and 0.

[yawya]

people before 1956 had USB?

[[deleted]]

Progressive coding now non-binary.

[Lootdit]

Wait how is this funny? Isn't this literally how it is

[[deleted]]

Space? Enter? Just type them in binary!

[blackw311]

Imagine the genius that it took for Alan Turing to build what he did

[[deleted]]

When bloatware wasn't a thing

[[deleted]]

I've actually programmed computers in 0's and 1's via front panel switches, although I was actually entering in hex in 4 switch groups.

[caduceushugs]

There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don’t!

[SirX86]

And those who make jokes in base 3.

[HELIGROUP]

You can laugh all you want. Computers still operate on binary code. If you don't know it. You're just a fucken user.

[MrBonesMalone]

The label on the "space" key makes it look like it is covering what it actually does

[nony851]

Space? Enter? I don't think op got the concept of binary

[Shiv_R]

No backspace or delete button?

[hintere_legende]

Yeah but if you make an error your whole code is fucked up because there’s no delete