RE: Decided to hang it up

For the first several years of my career, "key to disk" or diskette
technology had not yet been invented - or at least it wasn't in any market
of which I was aware, so I did my share of card sorting (and punching).
First with the 80-column variety on the 360/20 and 360/30, which had 16KB
core memory boxes (about the size of a double 170 today), and no disk at
all. Later, on the S/3 it was 96-column cards... our S/3 Model 10 also
lacked a disk drive initially (but it sported a DOUBLE card reader/punch!).
We upgraded later to a Model 8 disk system. Soon after that, the 3741
diskette reader/writer became available. It came in 4 models: Models 2 and
4 had programmability (ACL), models 3/4 communicated over BSC lines. ACL
("Application Control Language") was a cool language, with 26 registers
(A-Z) and 10 storage locations (0-9) (that's probably backwards). It looked
a lot like what became the S/32 system. I wrote a whole remote sales
reporting and inventory management application on that model 4, and we had
them running in Orlando, Houston and Indianapolis.

Ah, nostalgia!

Dennis Lovelady
http://www.linkedin.com/in/dennislovelady
--
"I'd like to thank my parents and my mother and father."
-- golfer Greg Norman, accepting an award

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-
bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of James Lampert
Sent: Thursday, April 14, 2011 6:41 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Decided to hang it up

Musselman, Paul wrote:

I can hear the younger crowd asking, "What's a card reader? Some

sort of credit card thing?"

Kind of depressing: I've *used* Hollerith cards (albeit only once or
twice, and only in connection with a system that had no
batch-submit-from-terminal functionality), and most of the programmers
I
know haven't a clue what a Hollerith card *is.*

On the other hand, one of the churches I bounce around among has a
digital organ that's old enough that it *takes* Hollerith cards for the
old Allen "Alterable Voices" feature. Although the cards aren't encoded
in Hollerith code, but rather in something denser, that's specialized
for squeezing a half-cycle sample into 80 columns.

--
JHHL
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