jenn ○f many things
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What 5 megabytes of computer data looked like in 1966: 62,500 punched cards, taking four days to load.
01:11 PM - Apr 28, 2024
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knits, purls, flowers, photons
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In response to jenn ○f many things.
That’s pretty much what it felt like standing with 25 cards of Fortran code and two social science grad students in front of me at the UConn card reader.
01:48 PM - Apr 28, 2024
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Travel Buff
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In response to knits, purls, flowers, photons.
It wasn't '66 but I sure do remember punch cards 👍️
04:51 PM - Apr 28, 2024
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knits, purls, flowers, photons
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I was a keypunch operator for my last two college summers. Sort of like a typist, but no errors allowed. In fact, the best key punch operator ran a machine called the verifier, they would just retype everything and if there was a hole where there shouldn’t be one the card would be rejected.
In response to Travel Buff.
07:18 PM - Apr 28, 2024
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Margo Green
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In response to knits, purls, flowers, photons.
My mom was a keypunch operator.
07:46 PM - Apr 28, 2024
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knits, purls, flowers, photons
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In response to Margo Green.
It wasn’t a bad job, although it was noisy. At least it was in an air-conditioned office.

In high school, I managed a job in an air-conditioned library while my peers often worked in the shaded tobacco field of Connecticut. That was a terrible job!
04:35 PM - Apr 29, 2024
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Travel Buff
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In response to knits, purls, flowers, photons.
lol. I vaguely remember that cards would be rejected and had to be repunched. A good keypunch operator was worth their weight in gold. Keypunch errors are not as easy to spot as text errors in code. I seem to recall I had to run my ms thesis by generating cards with the type codes on them. Long ago!
07:37 PM - Apr 28, 2024
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