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From: hoey@ai.etl.army.mil (Dan Hoey)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: C obfuscator
Message-ID: <12@ai.etl.army.mil>
Date: 30 May 90 20:13:22 GMT
References: <12546@netcom.UUCP> <220@taumet.COM> <12573@netcom.UUCP> <898@nlsun1.oracle.nl> <1990May29.132631.2253@pdn.paradyne.com> <1990May30.065025.25861@diku.dk> <229@taumet.COM>
Reply-To: hoey@ai.etl.army.mil (Dan Hoey)
Organization: Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC
Lines: 43

In article <229@taumet.COM> steve@taumet.com (Stephen Clamage) writes:
>... For you youngsters out there ....

I punched my first deck of cards in 1968.  I was a high school junior in a
summer intern program at Goddard Space Flight Center.  I had just read this
book about the SDS 930 assembler language and I was excited about trying to
write a real program.  After I wrote it down on a coding form* I went from the
building my office was in to a separate building where they had a noisy, hot,
stuffy room with this card punching machine that had a keyboard that I could
use my recently-learned touch typing on as long as I was typing alphabetic
letters, but for numbers and punctuation it used this sort of shift key and the
numbers and punctuation were all over the letters and it was hunt-and-peck.
The most tortuous part was that I had to look away from the keyboard for the
touch typing to work, and back to the keyboard to do hunting and pecking, and
back to the coding form to see what I was supposed to be typing, and if I
thought I might have made a mistake but wasn't sure, I couldn't see the
character I had just punched, it was hidden under the puncher.  I could type
space, and look at it, and backspace, but the backspace wasn't a key, it was a
big button under the punch station and I had to take my hand off the keyboard
and put it back and find the home row again afterwards.

I sweated over that thing for two hours.  A lot of rejected cards went into the
pile, and I needed to look them over, but I wanted to get out of the torture
chamber and back to the peaceful office.  You know the Beatles song, ``When the
rain comes, they run and hide their heads.  They might as well be dead.''  In
the lobby a crowd was waiting for a summer shower to finish.  Laughing at these
poor worker ants I ran across the lawn to the building with my office.  I got
in the door and shook the water off my head and tried mopping my glasses dry
with my shirt, humming the song, and my office mate came by and said, ``You
know, those cards won't go through the reader.''  The deck was soggy and warped
and pretty much useless.

Eventually I got them dried out and managed to use the card punch to duplicate
some of them onto good flat cards.  Eventually I learned to keypunch without
undue stress.  Eventually I even got to write a program that worked.  So I
guess that moment of looking at those precious, ruined cards was the low point
of my career.

Dan

*For you youngsters, a coding form is sheet of paper with eighty spaces marked
on each line, so you can write down which card column each character is going
to go into.  It used to matter.