Re: Punch Cards

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My favorite punch card recollection from the good old days
almost defies belief.

Registering for classes at FAU back in the last century involved
getting your master ID punch card at the admin building, then
schlepping around all over campus to each department where they
had pre-punched cards for all the available slots in all the
classes.

You'd collect all the cards for all the classes you wanted to take,
then bring them back to the admin building where the real magic
would happen:

With the master card in front of the class cards for each student,
the cards would be piled into one of those massive patchboard
programmable duplicators. This would copy the student ID from the
master card and punch it onto the following class cards, except
when it failed to recognize the next master when it would continue
to duplicate the ID on the next student's master.

Fortunately the highly trained operators could detect the sound
of ID numbers being duplicated on top of cards that already
had ID numbers on them and stop the machine so the screwed up
cards could be taken out and new copies punched by had to feed back in
on another try.

Once the ID numbers were on all the cards, you'd take the fantastic
pile of cards accumulated and bring them to the other machine:
The card sorter where, in pass after pass through the night, the
intrepid operators would eventually get the cards sorted by ID.

Finally this offering of cards was fit to be fed to an actual
computer program which would update a new student record tape
from the sorted input cards and the old tape in a classic
one pass update algorithm.

In a major upgrade to the system at one point, they got rid
of the patchboard duplicator, and instead fed the cards to a
computer program which did the duplication of the ID numbers
and punched out a new deck they could then run through the
sorter :-). [How many trees did that kill I wonder].

To the question of why they couldn't do the sort on the computer
as well, the answer was always "don't ask".

I'm aware that this boggles the mind, but I swear this is the
absolute truth (if I was gonna stretch things, I'd have put in
something about having to carry boxes of cards through sniper
fire :-).

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