reggie@dinsdale.paradyne.com (George W. Leach) (05/29/90)
In article <898@nlsun1.oracle.nl> bengsig@oracle.nl (Bjorn Engsig) writes: >I used to use such a thing at the university when we had nothing but punched >cards, HASP, JCL and all that stuff, and it was quite handy to compress a >working 1000 card program to a 100 card program. Where were you when I did my huge GPSS program on cards!!!! >But who uses punched cards these days? I do! For book markers :-) George W. Leach AT&T Paradyne (uunet|att)!pdn!reggie Mail stop LG-133 Phone: 1-813-530-2376 P.O. Box 2826 FAX: 1-813-530-8224 Largo, FL 34649-2826 USA
jensting@skinfaxe.diku.dk (Jens Tingleff) (05/30/90)
reggie@dinsdale.paradyne.com (George W. Leach) writes: >>But who uses punched cards these days? > I do! For book markers :-) And they're good for signs etc, in that they hold four characters of a convenient size (when written with a speed-marker..). Here at DIKU all abbreviations etc. are four chars long for that reason ;^) Actually, the use of magnetic media takes away a lot of the mechanical charm of computer background storage. Paper tape and punched cards are more *FUN*. Think of the endless fun you can have putting together a stack of cards dropped on the floor.... Jens jensting@diku.dk is Jens Tingleff MSc EE, Research Assistent at DIKU Institute of Computer Science, Copenhagen University Snail mail: DIKU Universitetsparken 1 DK2100 KBH O
dmt@pegasus.ATT.COM (Dave Tutelman) (05/30/90)
I missed the base posting, so I'm going by the subject line alone. Sorry if I'm off base ;-> There is a commercially available "C obfuscator", called "C-Shroud", from Gimpel Software. They developed it because their flagship product, Flexe-LINT, had to be distributed as a source product and compiled on the customer's target machine. So they developed C-Shroud to pre-process the Flexe-LINT source before they shipped it. They now sell C-Shroud as a product in its own right. Actually, this might become a common trick in the UNIX software field. If the portability of UNIX continues to assure a diverse hardware base in the field (as opposed to, say, the uniform hardware base for MSDOS), then it might be really hard to attack the market with a binary product. Even if you can manufacture it for all the target machines, inventory problems would limit your ability to sell it through the retail channel. But a shrouded source product might be the answer to a single-inventory package for UNIX. Hope this is on the topic (or at least interesting). Dave +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | Dave Tutelman | | Physical - AT&T Bell Labs - Lincroft, NJ | | Logical - ...att!pegasus!dmt | | Audible - (201) 576 2194 | +---------------------------------------------------------------+
steve@taumet.COM (Stephen Clamage) (05/31/90)
In article <1990May30.065025.25861@diku.dk> jensting@skinfaxe.diku.dk (Jens Tingleff) writes: >*FUN* Think of the endless fun you can have putting together a stack of cards >dropped on the floor.... My most enjoyable experience was recovering from 3 boxes of punched cards (6000 cards) getting rained on when the roof leaked. After that, I kept them under the table or in the file cabinet. Then there was the guy who fell into the fountain while carrying the ONLY copy of an important program on punched cards... (For you youngsters out there, cards won't go through a reader once they have gotten wet.) -- Steve Clamage, TauMetric Corp, steve@taumet.com
buckland@cheddar.ucs.ubc.ca (Tony Buckland) (05/31/90)
In article <1990May30.065025.25861@diku.dk> jensting@skinfaxe.diku.dk (Jens Tingleff) writes: >reggie@dinsdale.paradyne.com (George W. Leach) writes: > >>>But who uses punched cards these days? > >> I do! For book markers :-) > Also grocery lists. Also, folded once, as a convenient sized and quite durable pants-pocket-containable record of miscellaneous information. And I try always to have a few blank cards in my briefcase (so I can take blank looks at them :-)). Long, long ago, someone at our installation fixed a hardware bug with a card. The bug consisted of intermittently shorting adjacent terminals. The fix consisted of ramming a card between them.
clarke@csri.toronto.edu (Jim Clarke) (05/31/90)
jensting@skinfaxe.diku.dk (Jens Tingleff) writes: >...Actually, the use of magnetic media takes away a lot of the mechanical >charm of computer background storage. Paper tape and punched cards are more >*FUN*. Think of the endless fun you can have putting together a stack of cards >dropped on the floor.... Kind of like rerolling a big roll of paper whose middle has fallen out. Basically, it's better to retype your program from scratch. Seems like it's been a few years since we posted this kind of old-timer stuff, at least in the groups I read. What fun to tell the same old stories again... Just ask me about Jodrell Bank! -- Jim Clarke -- Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4 (416) 978-4058 clarke@csri.toronto.edu or clarke@csri.utoronto.ca I'd tell you life's a beach, but I'm afraid you'd take me littorally.
hoey@ai.etl.army.mil (Dan Hoey) (05/31/90)
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.
sullivan@aqdata.uucp (Michael T. Sullivan) (05/31/90)
>>>>But who uses punched cards these days?
I don't know about punch cards but I have a friend that works for
an aerospace company that still uses paper tape to send programs
from one installation to another.
--
Michael Sullivan uunet!jarthur!aqdata!sullivan
aQdata, Inc. sullivan@aqdata.uucp
San Dimas, CA +1 714 599 9992jwp@cupcake.sal.wisc.edu (Jeffrey W Percival) (05/31/90)
The C obfuscator that someone posted didn't work on my Ultrix VAXstation 2000. It creates the old =* ambiguity and my compiler barfs. Any fixes? -- Jeffrey W Percival (jwp@larry.sal.wisc.edu) (608)262-8686
ben@fungus.bsd.uchicago.edu (Benjamin Andrew Herman) (06/01/90)
d:->stuff..... deleted .... What fun to tell the same old stories d:->again... Just ask me about Jodrell Bank! d:->-- d:->Jim Clarke -- Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4 OK Jim, I'm Game. Tell us about the Jodrell Bank. (this is a name I've never heard of and I thought I'd Heard it all) Ben Herman Please pardon the offensive signature .... ben@fungus.bsd.uchicago.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thought for the month: Mickeys? Malt liquor? That stuff will make you want to F**k women up the a**. No man Listen: My girl and I downed a six last weekend and I know what happened! -- Some 18 yr old at a liquor store Football combines the worst elements of America: Mass violence punctuated by committee meetings.
karl@haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer) (06/01/90)
In article <1100@cupcake.sal.wisc.edu> jwp@cupcake.UUCP (Jeffrey W Percival) writes: >The C obfuscator ... creates the old =* ambiguity and my >compiler barfs. Any fixes? (a) get a real compiler. (b) sed 's;=\([+*/<>%&^|-]\);= \1;g' Karl W. Z. Heuer (karl@ima.ima.isc.com or harvard!ima!karl), The Walking Lint
zvs@bby.oz.au (Zev Sero) (06/01/90)
In article <12@ai.etl.army.mil> hoey@ai.etl.army.mil (Dan Hoey) writes:
*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.
It still does in RPG and related languages.
--
Zev Sero - zvs@bby.oz.au
...but we've proved it again and again
that if once you have paid him the danegeld,
you never get rid of the Dane. - Rudyard Kiplingjharkins@sagpd1.UUCP (Jim Harkins) (06/01/90)
In article <4803@pegasus.ATT.COM> dmt@pegasus1.ATT.COM (Dave Tutelman) writes: >There is a commercially available "C obfuscator", called "C-Shroud", >from Gimpel Software. > > [stuff on using C-Shroud as a "secure" way to distribute UNIX source removed] If this idea catches fire how long do you think it will take for un_C_shroud to show up on comp.unix.sources? My money says within a year. -- jim jharkins@sagpd1 I *still* don't know who killed Laura Palmer!
buckland@cheddar.ucs.ubc.ca (Tony Buckland) (06/02/90)
In article <1990Jun1.020239.11844@melba.bby.oz.au> zvs@bby.oz.au (Zev Sero) writes: >In article <12@ai.etl.army.mil> hoey@ai.etl.army.mil (Dan Hoey) writes: > > *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. Last year, I actually dug out and used some FORTRAN coding forms. I needed to track what was happening in a buggy version of qsort, on a 72-item list, and I found 80-column forms turned sideways were an ideal medium to represent the interchanges in the sublists. When I began my career, I used to *write programs* on coding forms, in clear block capitals so that the keypunch operators could punch my source deck for me. Lower case wasn't an issue, since hardly any of the devices available to me could deal with lower-case letters. Then came the wave of the future, with a TN print train mountable on special request, and 3278 terminals.
steve@monu6.cc.monash.edu.au (Steve Balogh) (06/04/90)
In article <898@nlsun1.oracle.nl> bengsig@oracle.nl (Bjorn Engsig) writes: >But who uses punched cards these days? I do! Just had a look under the table in my office and there are about 12,000 unused punch cards in boxes under there. But you can't have them. :-) .... They are EXCELLENT for making quick notes on. The pile I have should last about another 6 years I estimate. :-) ----_--_-_-_--_-__-_------_-__---_-___-_----_-____-_-_--__-_--_--___-_-_-_--__-_ Steve Balogh (Network Manager) VK3YMY | steve@monu6.cc.monash.edu.au Chisholm Institute of Technology | steve%monu6.cc.monash.oz@uunet.UU.NET PO Box 197, Caulfield East | ICBM: 37 52 38.8 S 145 02 42.0 E Melbourne, AUSTRALIA. 3145 | +61 3 573 2266
steve@monu6.cc.monash.edu.au (Steve Balogh) (06/04/90)
In article <1990May30.150847.20305@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> clarke@csri.toronto.edu (Jim Clarke) writes: > Just ask me about Jodrell Bank! Tell me about Jodrell Bank. Steve ----_--_-_-_--_-__-_------_-__---_-___-_----_-____-_-_--__-_--_--___-_-_-_--__-_ Steve Balogh (Network Manager) VK3YMY | steve@monu6.cc.monash.edu.au Chisholm Institute of Technology | steve%monu6.cc.monash.oz@uunet.UU.NET PO Box 197, Caulfield East | ICBM: 37 52 38.8 S 145 02 42.0 E Melbourne, AUSTRALIA. 3145 | +61 3 573 2266