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Nerdy Reading

masswerk.at

41 pointsmasswerk20 comments

The first Project Gutenberg text, the declaration of independence, was typed in all caps into a mainframe in 1971. I wonder if it ever got stored as punch cards?

They talk about how they initially chose short texts because even ASCII texts outstripped early storage mediums at first.

Everything about this is magnificent.

As with many other great hacker projects, the answer to why is "because they could"

Well, it's … mumble … yet another blog post… :-)

But the post wouldn't exist without https://www.masswerk.at/card-readpunch/

(btw the reader link on that page is 404 https://www.masswerk.at/card-readpunch/cardreader)

Thanks for reporting this.

(The even more severe problem is that I never got to implementing Fortran and/or Cobol. That is, I do have some parts of this, but I would have to start all over to get into that part of the project again.)

BTW, I found a use case, proposing it's for learning Hollerith code (or EBCD) the "natural way". Like Babble, but for punch cards! – Where's that sweet VC? What, you mean, I need a business plan, as well? ;-)

Blurb on punch cards, they are not binary!

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/16112/wha...

Fun fact, there were binary punch cards, both row binary and column binary. These were used prominently for system software (startup, diagnostics, etc).

The problem with punch cards is that they lose integrity, if there are too many punches (holes). So the usual variants of Hollerith code and EBCD worked around this by applying never more than 3 punches per column. Mind that punch cards were a major storage format even in the interwar years, long before computers, when they were filling entire warehouses with accounting data, etc. And you wanted these to be somewhat robust as they were subject to rather rough treatment by purely electro-mechanical appliances. E.g., WWII was mostly payed for by punch card accounting on the US side. (Later formats on the IBM S/360 and S/370 used much larger sets and therefor more fragile encodings, including the full ASCII set.)

Punch cards were actually legacy technology in the computer age, right from the beginning. E.g., the Univac I, the first computer commercially available in the US, used high-speed steel tape. IBM, on the other hand, favored punch cards and built their growing imperium on the compatibility with existing storage formats (which was a strong argument), while other vendors eventually gave in, more or less reluctantly.

It may be because it's 7 AM here and I just woke up, but I didn't understand how to read it.

I couldn't even figure out what it was trying to be. Is it an art collection? A nerdy hobby project, but a type of thing people collect and use? Are they stories, or nonfiction?

Maybe being hard to read is part of the point, but if so, I think it's made much too well!

See my other reply.

This is a joke / nostalgic memory for old computer programmers, who can still remember the time when such punched cards where used to store any computer program that you wrote, so that a computer would be able to read the program.

It was out of the question to write directly the program on a terminal connected to the computer (before the invention of time sharing) because the running time of the computer was too expensive to be acceptable that it should wait until you type at a keyboard.

So the computer programs were recorded offline on punched cards, then the computer read the program from the punched cards at high speed, maybe storing it on a hard disk or on a magnetic tape, if you wanted to run the program more than once.

I was perplexed as well. It seems to be Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" written at the very top of the library punch cards.

this might provide some background:

https://www.masswerk.at/card-readpunch/

> It seems to be Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" written at the very top of the library punch cards.

Each card has some text printed on the top row. The bulk of the card is a grid of pre-printed numbers. Punching out holes on the card lets you represent data in a standardised character format, where successive columns represent individual characters (from top to bottom). For example, in the IBM 80-column format [0]. The text printed on the top of a card makes individual cards human-readable.

When I first encountered computers, in approx 1979, this was how we programmed them. Now get off my lawn, with your new-fangled glass-teletypes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card#IBM_80-column_for...

The method used to print the labels on top of the cards is rather fascinating, as well, and involves a mechanical bit store for the matrix font. (No electronics involved, all electro-mechanical.)

https://www.masswerk.at/misc/card-punch-typography/

Those are the kind of punch cards that were used as the main method to introduce programs or any other kind of numeric or textual data into old computers, before the mid seventies, when the floppy disks became popular.

Like the telephone with a dial disk or the monitor with a CRT screen, this is an unfamiliar object for not too old computer programmers.

Nevertheless, there was a time when writing any computer program required it to be punched on such cards, one 80-character line per card, then you could read your program like with this Jane Austen example and you had to be exceedingly careful to not spill down the cards on the floor, or you would have to do a lot of work to sort them again in the correct order of the program lines.

> you would have to do a lot of work to sort them again in the correct order of the program

Actually, there were machines called card sorters that could sort cards back into the right order.[1] In the card images shown on this page, you can see that there are sequential serial numbers in columns 73 - 80, which could be used to sort these cards.

Many programming languages, such as Fortran, would ignore anything punched after column 72, allowing columns 73 - 80 to be used for this purpose.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_card_sorter

It’s either a form of art or crap!

At least, we learn that "Pride and Prejudice" translates into 10,711 physical SLOC (source lines of code) or 10.7 KLOC (kilo lines of code). A metric good to know, if you want to manage a book… ;-)

[0] https://www.ifpug.org/content/documents/Jones-LinesofCodeMet...

I believe it is an art project of some nerd who took "Pride and Prejudice" and translated it into classical punch cards. I stored some of the cards as images on my computer and took some reader to see if they really contained what the author stated and yes - they translated back into the novel's text.

So it looks like a summer/fun/art project.

I liked it and it fueled a little bit of nostalgia for me.

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