[geeks] punch punch, duplicate, punch

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Monday, December 17, 2001 at 14:16:10 (-0800), Ken Hansen wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [geeks] Software Bloat
>
> Of course, you'll have to come visit me at the "old
> Coders Home", where we sit around and reminisce about
> punching humorous patterns with the papertape punch...

I made christmas cards from cards once -- I figured out, by hand on
graph paper with a code table at my side, how to keypunch "XMAS" into a
card by feeding it through the punch a couple of times (I don't remember
how many times I had to feed it through any more though, and I think
I've lost the notebook containing the sequences you need to punch, not
that you can walk into any university any more and find a bunch of
keypunch machines in an open room, or even hallway, near the datacentre).

The cool thing was that once you had any pattern of holes you could put
it in the keypunch machine and duplicate it!  The more holes there were,
the more racket it made, but I never jammed it (at least not that way! ;-)

Then I wrote the to/from greetings on them by hand....   :-)

> Oh, and the joy we felt when we could upgrade to the
> "god-like" speed of 300 baud dial-up access to the
> mainframe!

Yeah, and you almost felt like you could only read that fast and that
anything faster would be too hard on your eyeballs!

Then I got a 1200 baud modem and learned I could even read that fast
too, and not much later I found 2400 baud to be too slow.....  ;-)

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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