pic: The warranty, voided

[dlavery]

Originally Posted by jdhawg

These young whipper-snappers these days don't know how good they have it. Why back in my day you walked five miles from the card punch room to drop the card deck off, then waited 45 minutes for the job to get run, then checked your listing to see if you could find the card that was mispunched so you could do it all over again. UNLESS the operators dropped your deck (know as "floor sorting") then you were is real trouble.

At the risk of dating myself, I remember when I wrote my first compiler for an IBM-360 as my junior-year project. I worked on it for a full semester, and carefully crafted it down to about 5000 lines of code - 2-1/2 cases of cards. I did the final edits, certified that it worked, and took the cases of cards back to the apartment to write the final paper on the project. Unfortunately, my apartment-mate was VERY ticked off at me (he kept yelling something about "you haven't paid your share of rent in 5 months!!!" or some such minor annoyance) and decided to get my attention. By shuffling all the cards in the cases.

What happened next was not pretty. Let's just say that it is a good thing that the statute of limitations has expired for most of the infractions...

-dave