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From: moroney@jon.DEC (Mike Moroney)
Newsgroups: net.rumor
Subject: Re: Computer horror stories (waffle cards)
Message-ID: <1629@decwrl.DEC.COM>
Date: Tue, 11-Mar-86 23:15:40 EST
Article-I.D.: decwrl.1629
Posted: Tue Mar 11 23:15:40 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 14-Mar-86 04:46:13 EST
Sender: daemon@decwrl.DEC.COM
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
Lines: 32


I used to punch all the holes out of IBM cards, too.  The O29's made awful
noises when duplicating them, they often jammed in the process.  I used
to call my creations "waffle cards".  When dropped, they will flop back and
forth, but nowhere as much as a new card. (I dug one out and tried it.)
For some reason the card reader where I went to school accepted such a card
as valid, and interpreted it as a card full of right (left?) parenthesis.

   When I went to college, I was often *very* cheap.  I found a couple of
tricks that allowed me to re-use a computer card up to 3 times. We had a CDC
Cyber running NOS, and one of the features of its job control language was it
would ignore any character after a period on a card.  This allowed me to take
an old FORTRAN card with a short statement and insert it in the keypunch
backwards and type a short control statement.  It would ignore the (now
backwards) FORTRAN statement when put in a deck backwards.  I could then take
the same card forward and use it as a record seperator card (special punch that
wasn't a valid character, the rest of the card would be ignored, the special
punch could be in any column, too.)  Another way to save a few cards was a
special "feature" of NOS that 2 consecutive colons in certain positions would
be interpreted as an end-of-line.  Therefore, I could type a short statement,
space over, type "::", and start a second statement on the same card.  Freaked
out a few operators by submitting a few valid 1 or 2 card "decks" when the
computing center added as a local mod short versions of common commands. 

  In the dark ages when terminals were very scarce (and used paper, and were
often 110 baud) a friend of mine, rather than wait for a terminal to become
free to edit a file, would type all the edit commands on CARDS and submit
his "edit session" as a batch job!  He almost never screwed up the edit,
either.

-Mike Moroney
..decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-jon!moroney