The Era of the Punched Card

Back in the early days of the computing industry, the way to program a computer was to type your program into a keypunch machine which punched holes into paper cards, one card per line of code.

You’d arrange these cards into a card deck that you submitted to the computer department at your local college, and wait for their staff to feed it into the machine, after which you’d get your results printed onto fan-folded paper.

Yes, the machine. One. And it was usually hours before you found out if your program worked or not.

That was my first brush with computers at my local community college.

It would take many days to debug our programs until they worked correctly, so we stored boxes full of cards in a project room that was secured with an electronic lock that opened if you punched in the right combination: 3.14.

Of course.

I marveled that all it would take is one prankster to enter that room and dash all those boxes onto the floor, after which we might never again get those cards reassembled into the proper order. Yeah, there was that lock, but everyone knew the combination.

Fortunately, that never happened, although on rare occasions people would accidentally drop their decks on the floor, requiring some frantic work to reconstruct them again.

We’d draw a diagonal line down the side of the deck with a marker to aid in that task, just in case.

I dropped a deck a few times myself but usually caught it before it completely fell apart.

If your program needed corrections there were keypunch rooms with multiple machines—each with a long line of people waiting behind it—where you could punch new lines of code to insert into the deck.

As you inserted, removed, or rearranged cards in the deck, that diagonal line would get more and more chaotic.

I seldom had to wait long for a keypunch thanks to a sly little trick I figured out.

There was one keypunch machine in particular that was quite temperamental. When it quit working, people would turn it off and put up an “Out of Order” sign. The line of people behind that keypunch machine would disperse as people lined up behind other machines.

But I happened to know from experience that the machine would start working again after being turned off for a while.

So I would come into the keypunch room, go right to that machine, turn it on, punch a few cards, and then leave.

There would be expressions of consternation as people formed a line behind that machine again, and the “Out of Order” sign would be taken down.

But after a few short minutes the machine would die once more and the “Out of Order” sign would go back up.

I imagine they had some kind of feelings about that, but if you think about it, I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Right? Right?

At my first real computer job, there was a keypunch department that would punch my cards for me. I would write my programs on coding forms, submit them, and after some time I would be able to pick up my card decks.

Then I would submit my card decks to be read into the computer by the computer operator, and wait a number of hours for my printed output to be returned. Regularly updated estimates of this “turnaround time” were posted outside the computer room.

The head of the keypunch department was a cheerful, rotund Filipino woman named Anita Gee. The first time we were introduced, she gestured expansively towards an open box of chocolates on her desk.

“Come! Grow fat with me!” she merrily sang out in invitation.

My card decks tended to get done first because my writing was so legible.

Years later, we got computer terminals on our desks and we were able to type our programs into the computer directly, without the need for punched cards. We had a ceremony in which we set a card on fire to celebrate the end of an era.

The card selected to be sacrificed was an “END” card, however—the last card in the deck, which could easily be replaced.

Even then, to voluntarily disturb a card deck was unthinkable. The habits of many long years die hard.