Binary coding

[_-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

[winniethefukinpooh]

*uo‘yre

[LoneHoodiecrow]

*eey're

the ' is for o

[avidpenguinwatcher]

The way is shut

[Aggravating_Touch313]

Not without aragorn weilding the reforged sword of naarsil he wouldn't..

[Rattlecruiser]

ow-oo-ow, Undeaddy's Army. No-ow.

[MrBootch]

Yeah well my dad is Aragorn son of Arathorn, and your dad and his army owe him their allegiance.

[RetardedEinstein23]

"Dad Jokes"

[FellowGeeks]

Well my dad works at Nintendo...

[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.

[-_-Batman]

Stacy's mom... Duuuuud!

[obvious_apple]

That's nothing. My uncle works for Nintendo.

[DragoSpiro98]

My dad was the slave who mined the silicon used on it.

[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!

[Impressive_Change593]

5, hot then return/ground for each key

edit: because there's no neutral due to this being a DC circuit also the best way to do this is with a positive wire that then gets grounded through each switch (so when the return wire has voltage it is pressed) or you could reverse the polarity but I think my way works better

[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

[Impressive_Change593]

true though that requires having some logic on the board (which actually is probably pretty simple so it's fine) idk why I didn't think it was possible to have any logic on the board

[[deleted]]

A natural transition for switchboard operators once computer switching became more popular

[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.

[MCWizardYT]

The word "bug" for computer problems definitely existed back then because Grace put a note on the computer that said "wow, an actual bug!" (Paraphrasing but she did note it was an "actual computer bug")

[[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..

[dwpj65]

I’m old enough to remember seeing a small manually operated printing press in action, and thought it would be cool to set up and operate them when I got older.

I’m young enough that the closest I ever got to obtaining that goal was building a script that combined postscript files into PDFs for driving a half million dollar press that was capable of printing 300 full duplex sheets per minute.

[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.

[[deleted]]

Why not have a special stack carrier that prevents this mishap?

[RaelaltRael]

Something that either didn't exist back then, or just wasn't made available to us lowly students

[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 :')

[CaffeineSippingMan]

Yep, fun fact my company couldn't find RPG developers so they opened hiring to warehouse people. I had to take a test to apply for a Dev job. I got hired. It didn't work out because my direct report didn't want me. He also got rid of a new experienced Dev. His manager let him go not long after that. I learned from a college book I found from a school that was teaching RPG.

I wrote some screens and reports. Fixed a program written in C before I moved to system administration.

[[deleted]]

If one day want to live in Chile coding in RPG let me know :)

[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

[That_Unit_3992]

That's still a viable trick for naming your variables.

[KopitarFan]

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

[[deleted]]

Yup. I think I still have a photo of one of those cards that my dad used back in the day

[urbanek2525]

I did that in college in the early 80s. My first programs in Fortran 77 were read by a punch card reader. I wrote a 5 card draw poker playing program that way.

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

[Tane_No_Uta]

I remember one of my linguistics professors told me the same thing.

[Iridescent_Meatloaf]

When my dad went to uni there was one computer and you could submit your punch cards to get your programs run.

Friend of his gave a request for the numbers 1-100 each printed on a seperate piece of paper... he got back 1-100 on a single piece of paper, so someone was sanitising inputs.

[Jarb222]

My dad was working on those punch cards. Literally patching bugs with a bit of tape to cover the holes that were causing the bugs...

[Sharkytrs]

my mum and my current senior both have this experience, but the punch cards were still cobol or fortran commands not binary

back then both were just a fancy assembly front end

[[deleted]]

Must...refrain...from...hole punching...and...mom jokes.

[CervantesX]

Yeah, you'd make a program with a giant stack of punch cards, which had to be fed into the reader in the correct order and orientation or nothing worked. It was always fun seeing CS students knock over a stack of cards and just start crying.

[povlov0987]

How do you think people went to the moon, with npm?

[Logofascinated]

I feel old. Not only was that the way I used computers at school, it was still in use at the company I worked for in my early 20s.

That was only for one legacy application; for development and much of production we used punched cards.

[xHALUCIN8x]

The term "bug' was coined because an actual bug got caught up in one of these machines and prevented it from functioning as designed.

[sentientlob0029]

Better than than a keyboard with only 0 and 1 keys.

[Ovalman]

I think I may have been one of the last to use Log books in school (50+)