greg@utcsri.UUCP (Gregory Smith) (02/18/87)
In article <1596@kitty.UUCP> larry@kitty.UUCP writes: >> 1. One wonderd what would happen if you forced read a card >> with a giant hole punched in it. It was tried and the >> card reader jammed. > > At my college a favorite stunt was to punch cards with all rows >and columns punched - leaving a Swiss cheese card with little mechanical >strength - but undetectable when viewed from the outside of a deck. Hmm. I tried to do this on a KP29 a few times, but after about 20 columns, the card would jam in its tracks, from lack of rigidity. At U of Waterloo, the engineering undergrads used this thing called WIDJET. It was a PDP-11 connected to an IBM 370 across campus, which thought the PDP was a card reader and line printer. The PDP was also connected to a bunch of VC404 terminals and a couple of DEC dot-matrix printers. One would edit one's WATFIV source on the PDP with a crude line editor, and then submit it for execution. This caused it to be queued to the virtual card reader (input data, of course, followed a JCL card which one typed in as part of the source). When the results came back to the virtual line printer, they were inhaled into a 'listing' file on the PDP which was uneditable, and which one could view on the terminal or queue to the local printer. Signing off the PDP caused one's files to vanish, so they had to be archived. To do this, the PDP put together a request that the following cards were to be shoved in a file, and queued it into the 'reader'. A dearchive operation caused the specified file to be 'printed', by which operation it was downloaded to the PDP again. The idea was to use the IBM machine, while avoiding the use of cards and tons of paper. To that end, it worked. But it was a rather bizzare programming environment, especially when you consider that most of the users had never used any computer. I discovered early on that my $ACC number which I entered as a virtual card on WIDJET could also be used to run physical cards the old fashioned way. Using WIDJET usually involved waiting for a terminal and then sitting waiting for your job to come back from the IBM (after waiting for it to be dearchived). On the other hand, cards could be dropped off before a class and the output picked up after. Card punches were rarely busy (thanks to the presence of WIDJET), and simple cut and paste operations could be done in the comfort of the coffee & donut lounge. The hard part was finding a keypunch with a servicable ribbon... -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Greg Smith University of Toronto UUCP: ..utzoo!utcsri!greg Have vAX, will hack...
michael@orcisi.UUCP (02/19/87)
> I discovered early on that my $ACC number which I entered as a virtual > card on WIDJET could also be used to run physical cards the old > fashioned way. Using WIDJET usually involved waiting for a terminal and That same account number gave you access to an interactive system that ran right on the /75 and was accessed through some of the klunkiest terminals (IBM, of course ;-)) I've ever used. I wish I could remember the model number. The keyboard felt like a keypunch and used to lock whenever the screen was active (as I remember).