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Thank goodness we don’t still have to punch cards with our hole punch every time we want to save a Word document.
Bad Machinery
New comics by John Allison
Thank goodness we don’t still have to punch cards with our hole punch every time we want to save a Word document.
I think even in 1997 I was mainly using punch cards for shims. And those were some pretty old cards.
Being the insufferable pedant that I am, I was going to nitpick that ASP (on the textbook in panel 2) couldn’t possibly have existed in the 90’s, but apparently it was introduced in 1996. The mind boggles. I think I was using Mosaic in 1996 (You know, the browser whose main selling point was that it could actually display pages that contained images.)
I just realized that Jack could, right now (or as soon as he could locate a computer with an Internet connection and a Web browser, anyway), go to my website, and it would look pretty much the same as it does today. At least the index page.
That’s not the half of it. At some point during his second year, he’ll be able to start reading Bobbins from the beginning.
The really weird part is, thanks to webcomics time, Shelley could start reading Bobbins from the beginning, before she starts working at City Limit.
I went for a job interview in 1998 with a company that made ASP textbooks. Ripped from the headlines. Or rather, ripped from the ASP books.
But did they make the ASP textbooks using only punch cards?
Because if there is a Hell, that’s what everyone there has to do each day.
The mystery deepens. It’s as if someone went through a great deal of trouble of set Jack up in 1997, giving him an identity, a purpose, a life. And of course, also made sure he couldn’t tell anyone he hadn’t even been born yet with some sort of hardcore mental block. But WHY? It all smacks of ‘Life on Mars’ [yes, I caught the earlier reference] but it seems a tad more sinister than that. If he grows up to be his hairdressing father, we might have an epic paradox to contend with.
Good lord, a hand operated card punch. I know the exist but I’ve never used one. Good for fixing *a* card, but you wouldn’t want to input a whole program making cards that way.
In 1981 I was the only person in my freshman programming class that knew how to run a keypunch machine. The upper class people got to use DEC 100 terminals. By junior year I had a computer in my dorm room and a modem to the computing center.
It’s not a punch card puncher, he just has to use the computer lab. (This is before laptops were any good, I think…) I have a punch card that my dad gave me as a kid, and we always used it as a bookmark. He worked with mainframes in the 70’s.
That was around the time I was smuggling my dad’s old 486 monochrome laptop into uni. It was definitely not-good, but then we didn’t know any better at the time.
I used those great punch card machines at University in the 70’s. They were fantastic machines. It felt like the future. When you finished you had to take the stack of cards to a window in the computer department and hand it over. It was like taking an offering to the temple. Then you had to wait 3 days to get your results. And whatever you do don’t drop that stack of cards.
Don’t forget to draw a diagonal line across the top of the stack in marker to help you if you did drop it, though
Drop it? How quaint. The university had a high speed card reader that I think used air pressure for sucking the cards through an optical reader. I think it took less than a minute to suck through a 2000-card stack (standard box size). I once witnessed someone not closing the collecting slider at the card exit. The machine shot a stream cards over a distance of several yards against the next wall where they ricocheted to the ground in a disorganized cloud. Very impressive and a lot more disruptive to card order. It was common practice to let a stack run through the puncher and have it sequentially numbered in the last 8 columns (which is why those columns are ignored by FORTRAN IV). There was one peripheral with several output bins that you could use for sorting a stack that had become undone. Those were the days. These days a mouse is an input device, but then it was the greatest danger to data integrity. Because a punch card box makes for great nests when hollowed out in the middle of all the data-carrying cards.
In 1980, we got to run the cards through the batch processor ourselves, and only had to wait one or two hours for the results. Then, of course, you had to find the mistake in your program, battle for a spot at a keypunch, and wait some more.
I have similar memories. Doing my best to “make sure” there were no mistakes in my program (Basic), punching the cards, handing the stack to the instructor, and waiting over the weekend for the instructor to take every student’s stack of cards to an office building up town where he would run the cards through a time-sharing computer that cost millions of dollars and took up an entire floor of the building. By Monday, I’d know that my program didn’t run (but not why).
All of that guaranteed that I would have no interest in computers until audio went digital.
Oh, the early ’70s!
The B&W laptop I handled c. 1991 wasn’t all that bad. It also wasn’t cheap, and no, I doubt that many university students had one, but the concept wouldn’t be alien. Jack’s understandable shock is making him exaggerate his problem.
And I don’t think that’s really a handheld card punch; I assumed it was a two-hole file punch, and Jack was just confused. The last time I used punch cards was in the ’80s, for mainframe batch control, and they were regarded as silly antiques and bloody nuisances even then.
I assume the same thing.
I used a hand card punch in school computer club in the late 1970s. The level of finger contortions required to punch X-5-8-9 for carriage return is the only thing I can remember, though. X was sometimes 12. We also had a reader for cards with pencil marks instead of holes, which was an advance of sorts but only gave you 40 columns to play with.
I remember my best friend’s dad had a work laptop in around 2004. It was massive, the size of the top of a side table, and I would have struggled to lift it by myself as the weedy thirteen year old I was. Not surprised Jack doesn’t have one, not being a rich kid and all.
Heh. Just noticed that Jack is holding Belle & Sebastian’s ‘If You’re Feeling Sinister’ – but didn’t that come out in 1998?
1996
The Boy With the Arab Strap was 1998
No, wait, nevermind. I see that it came out in ’96. Don’t judge mem man. I’m old.
Nevermind was ’91 🙂
Is a mem man anything like a merman?
And old people make typo’s, too.
As I’ve gotten older, I find the number of typos I make has gone up. I catch most of them before I post/print, but even when you just count the ones that survive the editing pass…
Pascal was def taught in the USA univs in the late 80s’ early 90s (ask me how I know). Maybe it could linger into the later 90s or maybe UK was just different from the USA which was very much web-cray-cray by then.
I think he’s just off on the puncher. Gotta stick those class handouts into binders dontcha know.
Computer punchcards were dead dead dead by the early 80s and that might be optimistic. A fun activity for grad students was finding professors’s boxes of punchcards from their 1970s PhD dissertations, looking at them, then putting them haphazardly back not knowing they were once in a very specific order…
Not that they would ever be used again…
I had exactly one class that used Pascal during my late-90’s degree, and it was in electrical engineering not comp-sci. CS was in the process of dumping all of us into Java without warning around 97-98.
In our case, they did teach Pascal at that time, it got replaced by C/C++ (and then later, by Java.) I would suspect the aughts were the time they did C/C++ exclusively, then the teens, Java.
I worked on my B.S. in the early aughts, and the degree required one computer science class: either C++ or FORTRAN, but I don’t recall FORTRAN actually being offered.
A year or two ago I asked for help on stack exchange for a C++ program I was writing. The responses I got from my MWE were as if I had three heads, due to the archaic style and classes I was using.
I got my BS in Chemical Engineering in the late 90s. They made us take FORTRAN and then use it to model continuous flow reactions in our controls class. I’m 90% sure that was to weed out students rather than actually teach us something useful since even then there were a ton of better software suites available.
C++ has had a resurgence thanks to things like Boost. I think if you are a system programmer (i.e. operating system coding, coding applications that aren’t doing much stuff with the internet etc) C++ has been the language for many years. This is a huge problem as I think fewer people know it or learn it despite its practical wide use
I used punch cards in the very early ’80s, but switched to terminals soon thereafter
Yeah, this place is a den of anachronism. Punch cards, Pascal, and Jack Finch are all of different eras, and none of those eras is 1997.
Perhaps a sign that Jack’s room might be the source of the space/time anomaly?
Happy Death Day!
Pascal did get taught in universities for much longer than it was relevant.
As others have pointed out Pascal was taught far longer than it should have been. The punchcards are just Jack not knowing any better. Especially since he’s holding a hole punch for making it possible to papers into a ring binder.
occam’s razor strikes again
If he was holding the manual card punch I used at school he would have needed both hands as it was a substantial chunk of metal. That was essential as there was a queue of 30 of us for two punches so you tended to pound things out (in EBCDIC if I remember correctly) as quickly as you could. The cards were for an ICL 2900 Series. At the end of the class the teacher would take our bundles and drive them to a local government office some miles away. We’d receive the cards and the printout (132 column, green and white striped) at the start of the lesson the following week. When we switched to a (single) Commodore PET (real-time computing!) the competition was even more fierce, until some well-heeled pupils acquired their own ZX81s.
You could very easily be describing Gloucester High School ca. 1979. (Except the card punch was a terminal.) Right down to the disruptive arrival of the Commodore PET, and its never-snarl-except-when-you-have-an-assignment-due cassette tape data drive.
Dr Challoner’s in Amersham, 1977. But we actually had a card reader and a teletype and acoustic coupler, so we could phone (IIRC) Imperial College, stick the handpiece in the box when we heard the tone, and then run our decks and get the error messages printed out straight away.
(some people also had numbers of dial-up connections for other computers, no idea how they were obtained, but IC was the official one. Bet sysops loved us.)
Busted, Rob! Yes, it was a Gloucester high school (with maroon blazers) Cards were apparently sent to Cheltenham (we were never able to meet the machine itself). The card punches I used were big chunks of metal with typewriter like keys on top that you had to use pairwise, pushing the pins directly through the cards (satisfying ker-chunk) and sweep up the chads afterwards. They tried to switch to mark-sense cards but those were horribly unreliable, even with 4B pencils. Yes, the PET’s tape drive was near-useless.
Wow!! My Gloucester High School was in Gloucester, Ontario, a suburb of Ottawa that’s now been absorbed into the amoeba of amalgamation. No blazers, but we had a debating club (probs to Ms. Beall and Ms. Pazdzior!) which occasionally called for them. 🙂
Who knows what madness I could have gotten up to if I’d thrown myself into Borland Turbo Pascal instead of journalism school?
I got to play with Visual Pascal a little. That was actually quite handy for some jobs.
Naught wrong with Star Sign
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xw49UgKoZnQ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwagonesque
Album so good that Ben Gibbard recorded a cover of the entire thing
The hole punch is, of course, a two-hole punch for preparing unpunched paper to be put in two-ring binders (which are more common in the UK than the three-ring type common in the US). Jack’s generation expect to take their university lecture notes on laptops and download the “handouts” from a web server.
Thumbs up for If You’re Feeling Sinister and Bandwagonesque, though.
I love that he doesn’t recognise a hole punch.
Ew, Pascal.
To quote Dean: LEARN C, BOY!
(I should talk. I took a class in Ada, which I’ve used for nothing whatsoever outside that classroom. Except resumé-padding, I guess, but I don’t think I could even honestly do that with it anymore.)
I did some work with Ada. I was then working as a US government contractor, and Ada was more or less designed for these huge projects. I found it singularly incompatible with my programming style. I cut my teeth on Basic on the PDP-11 by DEC, and my way was to write the code, try it out and fix what needed fixing. The Ada program refused to even COMPILE unless things were pretty much all right. Ada and I did not get along!! 😉
The thing that got me about Ada was that it was so aggressively typed that
declare
would refuse to compile.X : FLOAT := 0;
tbf, that would refuse to compile in most languages
The hole punch is, of course, a two-hole punch for preparing unpunched paper to be put in two-ring binders (which are more common in the UK than the three-ring type common in the US). Jack’s generation expect to take their university lecture notes on laptops and download the “handouts” from a web server. His confusion between the technologies of 1997 and 1977 or 1957 is great, though.
Thumbs up for If You’re Feeling Sinister and Bandwagonesque, though.
(Hang on, why was that comment still in the edit box if I’d already posted it? Also, repeating “though” at the end of sentences, ugh.)
So Jack appeared bodily in 1997, but he’d existed there as well? Where’s the 1997 Jack, was he swapped into, what, 2020?
And… ‘Introduction to Pascal’ as a course in 1997?
Not unrealistic. I learned Pascal as part of my computing A Level in ‘98-‘99, then did Ada (a Pascal variant) as part of my computer science degree. I also owned both those albums (still do!).
Some University Comp Sci degrees in the UK focus very much on teaching you the theory, using a salad of good teaching languages like Pascal (probably Python these days), then leave you to learn C/C++/C#, Swift, Rust, Java or whatever by yourself using, the meta knowledge you’ve obtained. I kind of hated it at the time, but it worked – makes you more adaptable.
Our Uni education was similar, though they had switched to teaching us in C++ (and C.) It did mostly focus on theory, but that’s the key distinction for “Computer Science” instead of something like “Software Engineering” (that wasn’t a degree, though.)
Having learnt with Pascal a few years earlier I ended up doing a Cert course that included C
I came to an agreement with my tutor at the end of the course that I would never code in C commercially if he gave me a pass mark… we both kept our parts of the bargain
I’m very curious about his parents. Are they the same or just two totally different person? The history was rewrite for Jack alone or for all his family?
I am curious to see when his mother shows up and develops a crush on him
I’d be curious to see his mother, period. I don’t believe we ever have. We’ve seen his father twice in 15 years, both times in a professional capacity. His home life has only ever been Jessica.
I don’t think so either, and if John Campbell says it, I will consider the matter settled.
TIL: Plenty of people here are even older than I. Also, in 1997, I’d be in the CS dept in front of a Sparcstation listening to B&S IYFS off my Discman and surfing the information superhighway using Netscape. Hard flashbacks.
Like on ‘Les Visiteurs’ with Jean Reno! From 1993!
Oh yes, Netscape on Unix and going to about:mozilla to get the fire-breathing Mozilla throbber. I wasn’t in CS so didn’t have access to SPARCstations, but did have an account on the computing service Sun server and could get to it through an X terminal emulator on a 486 PC in the general-access computer labs. It was a great step forward from getting my email through an IBM mainframe.
I think it’s a body swap. Someone has shifted to Jack’s place in the future.
Like on ‘Les Visiteurs’ with Jean Reno! From 1993!
The above comment is time-swapped with this one.
“The closest we’ll ever get to heaven is 1997…”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYdNTTW9fJI
(It’s all still punch cards, just now they’re in ‘the Cloud’. Some poor sap at Google or AWS gets a penny a card to punch them for us.)
At one point in the early 90s Teenage Fanclub were my absolute nemeses. They were at every flipping gig I went to. Walked into a local venue expecting someone else – Teenage Fanclub were playing instead. Then they replaced someone else as a support at another gig. Shortly after that I was excited to see Babes In Toyland support Sonic Youth, but, noooooo, we got Teenage Flipping Fanclub. Bored the absolute living arse off me.
Oh Jack. The lack of a computer in the room is certainly conspicuous, but I doubt that it will be explained by a practice of students writing code on paper. And a Pentium tower case with a 17″ CRT would certainly not fit under the bed!
What the frell? I took Intro to Pascal in college. 1987. It wasn’t punchcards, but we used the same machine we used to learn Compiled BASIC: An HP 3000. It was the reason I dropped out of the computer science program. I realized I hated writing code.
I should have taken “Introduction to Databases” or “Intro to C” but I got some bad advice from the head of the department. Or even Lisp.
I think Jack’s grasp on the history of computing is a little rough on the details (and John A might be engaged in some light trolling)
Mads why are there thirty posts about a throwaway hole punch joke, please help me
John you should know your audience by now! It’s good that you know enough to not actually think they were using punch cards in the 90’s!
People here love their punch cards. And their youth, for that matter.
In 1961 I told my dad that I would have a computer someday so I wouldn’t have to remember unimportant details like dead Presidents or capitals of states. He laughed, telling me they cost millions of dollars! When I gave my mother a computer I had built about 40 years later he took one look at it and said, “What is it?”
I used the World’s 1st Laptop (called FADAC) in 1968.
As others have said, punched cards were no longer in use in most places in the Nineties. Punched paper tape held on longer as a mechanical storage medium, and that mainly for legacy machinery that still had paper tape readers attached.
VDU’s began to be introduced in the Seventies and your program would be stored on the machine itself, or on magnetic tape if it was something very large.
Manual card punches did exist – way back in the days when the Hollerith card had been invented for census data such things were useful – but even in the Sixties you’d use an IBM 029 card punch machine for that job. Nobody I’ve ever heard of used a manual hole punch to create program or data, not on cards or on paper tape.
As an aside to those folks bemoaning what happened if you dropped a card stack: There’s a reason that the coding standard specified 72 characters per line when you had an 80-column card. Those last eight columns used for index numbers so you could write something like PROJnnnn in those last eight (or get the card punch machine to do it for you) and then if you dropped a stack you just picked it up, made sure all the card were the right way up and loaded them into a card sorter which would eventually present them to you as a properly ordered stack. Impressive machines with lots of bins for holding cards during the sorting process. Where do you think sort algorithms came from 🙂
Hollerith punch card machines – I remember my dear old mum telling me about those. I can also remember her telling me about doodle bugs following the train as she was on her way to work during the Bitz. I don’t know how contemporaneous the two were though.
And as others have said, this is clearly a regular hole-puncher for paper that jack mistakenly thinks is for punched cards.
Teenage Fanclub and Belle and Sebastian. You put some respect on those names, young man.
So Jack didn’t just appear in the past — he had an entire life waiting for him.
I think the first thing I’d do is see how this impacted my family. If he’s a student in this time period, were his parents moved back in time as well to have him earlier? And if so, what about their parents? And so on…
My father tells of teaching high school computer science with card punches in the late 70s. My husband tells of writing his first, extremely rudimentary code on a computer when he was 2 in 1984 (he was a very early reader, his mom had been a computer programmer and his dad is an electrical engineer, if you’re wondering how that happened).
So while it makes sense that Jack wouldn’t have a computer in his room, since they would still mostly be desktops, and large ones at that. But I’m confused about the card punch, unless it’s for history of computer science.
Unless the UK was 20 years behind the US in computer technology in the 90s??
Yes, just like the UK is now.
I took a high school class on Fortran around 1981, using punch cards. That was pretty archaic even then. At college in the mid ’80s I think there were still a few keypunches around gathering dust, but students mostly used terminals connected to mainframes, which over the course of that decade gradually got superseded by clusters of networked PCs. Pascal was used a lot.
I still don’t know what’s happening, but the ending of this will be put Shelly on the Ministry of History’s radar, I can tell. (I can’t tell, but it’ll seem really good if I’m right, to quote Jack Finch approx. 8 million years ago.)
Back in punch card days, I occasionally used the card sorter, but we mostly referred to it as the “card shredder”.
There were a number of ways to get in trouble when fixing a deck with a problem card:
— make the new replacement card; throw it away; put the old card back.
— put both of them back.
— throw both of them away.
— put the new card back, but in the wrong place in the deck.
— put the new card facing front to back, or upside down, or the other combinations.
Don’t ask me how I know about these things.
Punching will be replaced by clicking!
I wonder what would come out of Jack’s mouth if he tried to say that now.
“Now” as in the past.
Where he is… now?
In 1997.
The nice thing (for me) about the comments on this page is that there are obviously a number of people here who are even older than me.
I’m certainly older than I was when I started reading all these comments about hole punches….
My experience of 1990s CS students (not me, but some housemates) was that at 8 a.m. they were more likely to be getting home from the computer labs than attending lectures.
Like me, Jack is erudite enough to know “the past is a foreign country” but not erudite enough to remember off the top of his head that it was L.P. Hartley who wrote it, in the first line of The Go-Between. Maybe I’ll remember that from now on.
Oh, and the name of the university is artfully concealed on Jack’s ID card.
I noticed that and was wondering if it has been established in past comics which university Shelley attended.