*does a little victory dance*
It is sad that our computers have become so complicated that a seemingly simple task is so hard that a victory dance is appropriate when one gets anything to work.
We should really go back to storing things on punched cards, and organizing our data by using cardboard boxes or cabinets with drawers. Life was easier then. Instead of encryption keys, we had locks on our file cabinets (and the key usually forgotten at home or locked inside the drawer).
Have you ever carried a program to the computer to be executed, but dropped it on the floor, and then had to spend several hours sorting the cards to get the program back together? Been there. After that, you get into the habit of religiously overpunching line numbers in the last 8 columns, and marking the deck with a diagonal line across the top with a felt pen, so a dropped deck can be sorted faster manually, and really fast by putting it into a sorting machine. That was a good habit.
Here is a bad habit from those times: Commenting your source code by writing the comments with felt pen on the cards. Works great, until you duplicate your source code, because the card duplicator only copies the holes, not the written comments.
1974-introduced CP/M-80 still had theSometimes I joke and say that FreeBSD has Plug 'n Play support for punch card readers lol
PUN:
and RDR:
standard devices, both were character I/O. cat /dev/rdr > myfile
pip rdr: myfile
Paper tape like this?LOL. Yes, and I remember the little rolls of punched paper (for those not ancient enough - they looked a little like the transaction journal paper rolls on old cash registers). We thought it was a great step up. We could edit our code by (quite literally) - cutting and pasting (or taping).
Paper tape like this?View attachment 4265