From: dave@horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall)
Subject: [TUHS] Anyone else here remember Portapunch?
Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2015 02:06:54 +1000 (EST) [thread overview]
Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.11.1506220203320.96902@aneurin.horsfall.org> (raw)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Subject: Re: [GreenKeys] Replacing Chad, was: Black tape
On Sun, 21 Jun 2015, Jones, Douglas W wrote:
> The flaws in the Votomatic were a bit subtle, but in retrospect, if you
> read the patents for the IBM Portapunch (the direct predecessor of the
> Votomatic) and for the Votomatic, you find that the flaw that was its
> eventual downfall -- at least in the public's mind -- is fully
> documented in the patents. Of course IBM's (and later CESI's, after IBM
> walked away from the Votomatic in the late 1960s) salesmen never
> mentioned those flaws.
Portapunch? Arrgghh!
We had to put up with that Satan-spawn in our University days... Only 40
columns wide, it had specific encodings for FORTRAN words, and it was just
as well that FORTRAN ignored white space (I know this for a fact, when I
fed a deck into a "real" card reader one time).
Being but mere impecunious Uni students and having to actually buy the
things, we resorted to fixing mis-punches by literally sticky-taping the
chads back.
For some reason, the computer operators (IBM 360/50) hated us...
I really do hope that the inventor of Portapunch is still having holes
punched through him with a paper-clip.
reply other threads:[~2015-06-21 16:06 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: [no followups] expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=alpine.BSF.2.11.1506220203320.96902@aneurin.horsfall.org \
--to=dave@horsfall.org \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).