@nikitonsky ugh

@nikitonsky
wow I got to play on one of those in college. we had one hammer that didnt fire in the 1403. using the ALDs from #ibm i figured out it was a blown fuse.
Each hammer driver circuit had its own fuse.
Also wrote a program to read the next card in, that was a thing.
i'm old and #python is better:-)

@nikitonsky this misses out the human stage in the loop, where you have to retype (or even re-punch) any card that has a visible error in it.
And once you have your corrected card deck (perhaps 2000 cards) you have to feed it into another machine that read the stack of cards and send it to the mainframe that queues it for processing and 24 hours later prints out pages and pages of fan sheet paper with all the logged cascading program errors, or occasionally your actual answer.

@nikitonsky

I once worked at a place where, in the common area, a table held a printer, a copier, a fax, and a shredder.

I thought: that's a nice portrait of the document lifecycle. Birth, reproduction, propagation, and death.

Then one day there was a big red-letter sign on the shredder: "THIS IS NOT THE FAX".

I was always curious who destroyed what, but maybe an explanation would spoil it.

@nikitonsky

For the scientific/engineering sector, the 1401's sibling, the 1620 which as part of a nearly-identical REPL loop.

@nikitonsky

I loved wiring Tab machines.

@nikitonsky

Thank you. Happy reminder for me

https://open.spotify.com/album/0q7kEkAKIcJzvwzIXVgrpV?si=ejY9RX7ESwa0Ng9yTNHePg

@nikitonsky
"It was on one of my journeys between the EDSAC room and the punching equipment that the realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs."

— Sir Maurice V. Wilkes

http://rotormind.com/blog/2016/Remembering-the-Cambridge-Computer-Laboratory/