The Old Test

[Eric]

[xromad]

18 hours ago, Eric said:

Bills, checks, appointment cards and many other things used to be printed on punch cards, for faster, easier processing. When I was in the Army in the mid-eighties, our medical/dental appointment notifications and such still arrived on them. 

Yeah, that's nice, but can you read Hollerith code? 

[tous]

1 hour ago, xromad said:

Yeah, that's nice, but can you read Hollerith code? 

I apologize, amigo, but that is not quite accurate.

I considered whether to just let it go and not offend you, but damn it, I'm an engineer.

 

Though Herman Hollerith developed the concept of holes in cards controlling machinery and more significant, tabulating numeric data, he died in 1929, long before what we deem as an electronic computer.

The punch card used in computers was encoded in EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code) developed by IBM.

Though some other electronic computers of the time used 8-bit ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange,) that encoding had extensibility problems as well as weaknesses in being represented as holes in punch cards.

 

Yes, there is a Hollerith Code, but it was never used on electronic computers.

 

<--- can still read punch cards

<--- has typed a bazillion cards on an IBM 029 keypunch

 

Edited September 20, 2019 by tous

[holyjohnson]

2 hours ago, Eric said:

[Paul53]

19 minutes ago, tous said:

I apologize, amigo, but that is not quite accurate.

I considered whether to just let it go and not offend you, but damn it, I'm an engineer.

 

Though Herman Hollerith developed the concept of holes in cards controlling machinery and more significant, tabulating numeric data, he died in 1929, long before what we deem as an electronic computer.

The punch card used in computers was encoded in EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code) developed by IBM.

Though some other electronic computers of the time used 8-bit ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange,) that encoding had extensibility problems as well as weaknesses in being represented as holes in punch cards.

 

Yes, there is a Hollerith Code, but it was never used on electronic computers.

 

<--- can still read punch cards

<--- has typed a bazillion cards on an IBM 029 keypunch

 

I've got a question! During WW II General or Admiral or Girl Scout Grace something or other doing code breaking with a behemoth of a calculating machine that used vacumn tubes as place holders waiting for the invention of the transistor. When a moth interfered with a connection, she said the computer has a bug, and great minds have argued ever since whether a man would have used a better term, like f****ing bug, or someting closer to what we really call it?

But never mind that. Wasn't she using punch cards?

 

[tous]

You are talking about Admiral Grace Hopper of the United States Navy.

At the beginning of the electronic computer age, the first machine, such as the Mark I and the ENIAC used paper tapes to store and replay instructions and to make the tape, each  instruction was entered by setting switches on the front panel of the machine and then storing it.

Yeah, it took a while.

We might say that the paper tapes were the precursor to the punch card.

Punches in paper tape were used for a long time after that to control milling machines, the precursor to the modern numeric control systems.

 

Young'uns would not recognize computing the in the 1960s-1970s and think that it was so crude and primitive it couldn't possibly be useful, but it was a great improvement over comptometers  and manual calculation.  The Mark I could perform three instructions (addition or subtraction) per second, far faster than a human.  The ENIAC, that followed a few years later could perform 5,000 instructions per seccond.

 

Edited September 20, 2019 by tous

[Batesmotel]

[BamaBud]

[Dric902]

10 hours ago, Eric said:

 

10 hours ago, Eric said:

I had both those 

[jmohme]

I can't find a good video of it, but how about an old grocery store clerk ringing up your groceries on a manual cash register?

I remember going to Smitty's Market and watching Smitty key in every item without error, on a big loud and clunky NCR register faster than the millennial at todays store can scan a cart full of bar coded items.

I also remember having to rush home before the ice cream melted in the trunk of the old Pontiac without AC.

[Rellik]

20 hours ago, Eric said:

Without resorting to Google, name that movie:

Anybody not knowing this movie, spends a night in the box.

[Swampfox762]

On 9/17/2019 at 4:53 PM, Dric902 said:

 

 

[Eric]

If you know why this race car is such a badass, you have a few years on you and you know your motorsports.

[Eric]

[tous]

31 minutes ago, Eric said:

If you know why this race car is such a badass, you have a few years on you and you know your motorsports.

Those were great days in IMSA racing.

It's mid-1980s.

Ferrari had pretty much disappeared from GTP racing.

The Porsche 962, the grandson of the awesome 917, was seemingly unbeatable.

And then along came Datsun with the ZX. and there was racing again.

If I recall, Jaguar was also in the mix with some great cars.

[railfancwb]

Plenty of pennies in the fuse box

Do the modern copper colored zinc pennies work as well as classic pure copper ones? And what about the steel pennies from WWII (1943?)?


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[railfancwb]

Damn you guys are old!
not you Ladies though...


 

 

So where is the picture of a left foot operated bright-dim switch? Or of the foot operated starter button near the gas pedal?


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[railfancwb]

I used these a lot in school...
 

Dropping or spilling a box of these could create anguish. Especially if one of the cards slid undetected under something.


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[tous]

51 minutes ago, railfancwb said:

Dropping or spilling a box of these could create anguish. Especially if one of the cards slid undetected under something.


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That's why the first seven columns were traditionally reserved for line numbers.

 

Edited September 20, 2019 by tous

[Huaco Kid]

 

[Eric]

[pipedreams]

With the earlier discussion about punch cards and tapes, this is what I used for a long time.

[Dric902]

1 hour ago, Eric said:

Chuck Barris was a hit man for the CIA

 

.

[Huaco Kid]

28 minutes ago, Dric902 said:

Chuck Barris was a hit man for the CIA

Dr. ("can you say penis?") Ruth Westheimer was a:

Westheimer joined the Haganah in Jerusalem. Because of her diminutive height of 4 ft 7 in (1.40 m),^[4] she was trained as a scout and sniper.^[2] Of this experience, she said, "I never killed anybody, but I know how to throw hand grenades and shoot."^[6] In 1948, Westheimer was seriously wounded in action by an exploding shell during the 1947–1949 Palestine war, and it was several months before she was able to walk again.^[3][7] (Wiki)

[DonMerlin]

I remember all that new stuff