Re: Silliness (was: Looking for good Ada95 book)

[bill.williams@gecm.com]

ok@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:

> adam@irvine.com (Adam Beneschan) writes:
> 
> >Gee, this thread is making me feel old.  Old, because I used to work
> >as a COBOL programmer, back when our programs had to be put in on
> >punch cards, which couldn't handle lower case at all.  So from having
> >to work for three years with listings that were constantly shouting at
> >me, I should have gone deaf years ago.
> 
> Actually, this is wrong.  Punched cards can handle lower case just fine.
> Maybe your card _punch_ couldn't, but the punched _cards_ could, and so
> could the reader.  I still have a couple of old S/370s quickrefs somewhere
> (a yellow one and a green one) and they list card codes for all the EBCDIC
> characters.  That's for 80-column cards; the 96-coumn cards used ASCII.
> The problem was most likely your printer.  When I was an undergraduate I
> used a B6700, which used EBCDIC, so it was quite straightforward to enter
> lower case, but our line printers couldn't _print it_.

I'm feeling pretty ancient today as well. When I was young and foolish
we had hand card punches - a button, attached to a blade for each
row on the card. This gives you two reasons for not using lower case:
first the printer won't print it anyway, and second your fingers get
tied (even more :-) trying to punch the right code.

Bill

-- 
Bill Williams                     |GEC-Marconi does not necessarily
GEC-Marconi Research Centre       |endorse my opinions!

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