Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tank!ncar!ico!ism780c!news
From: news@ism780c.isc.com (News system)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Punched Cards
Message-ID: <43486@ism780c.isc.com>
Date: 5 Jun 90 20:58:02 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> <1990Jun1.211352.4749@unhtel.uucp> <5157@stpstn.UUCP>
Reply-To: marv@ism780.UUCP (Marvin Rubenstein)
Distribution: comp
Organization: Interactive Systems Corp., Santa Monica CA
Lines: 24

In article <5157@stpstn.UUCP> lerman@stpstn.UUCP (Ken Lerman) writes:
>In the "Good Old Days", Fortran was punched in columns 1-72 of the 80
>column card with 73-80 used for (an optional) sequence number.
>
>As I recall, the 7090 class machine had a 36 bit word and could thus
>contain 24 words of data (in binary mode) plus have an 8 character
>sequence number.
>
>Does anyone out there know if these two "facts" are related?

Yes, the two are very closely related.  FORTRAN was originally designed as
an IBM/704 programming language.  The 704 (and 709, 7090,7094) had a card
reader that could read only 72 columns of a Holerth card.  The particular
columns to be read was controled by a patch panel located in the card
reader.  The common convention was to read the first 72 columns.  So this
was the way FORTRAN was designed.

BTW: The FORTRAN printing convention of FORMAT(1H1) to do new page (as well
as other column one controls) also arose from a hardware requirement.  There
was a machine called a 716 (I think the number is correct) that was a hard
wired tape to printer machine.  It used the first character of the record
for forms control.

     Marv Rubinstein