[HN Gopher] Nerdy Reading
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Nerdy Reading
Author : masswerk
Score : 33 points
Date : 2021-07-26 07:51 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.masswerk.at)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.masswerk.at)
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| The first Project Gutenberg text, the declaration of
| independence, was typed in all caps into a mainframe in 1971. I
| wonder if it ever got stored as punch cards?
|
| They talk about how they initially chose short texts because even
| ASCII texts outstripped early storage mediums at first.
| mrleinad wrote:
| It may be because it's 7 AM here and I just woke up, but I didn't
| understand how to read it.
| andersource wrote:
| I was perplexed as well. It seems to be Jane Austen's "Pride
| and Prejudice" written at the very top of the library punch
| cards.
| deepstack wrote:
| this might provide some background:
|
| https://www.masswerk.at/card-readpunch/
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > It seems to be Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" written
| at the very top of the library punch cards.
|
| Each card has some text printed on the top row. The bulk of
| the card is a grid of pre-printed numbers. Punching out holes
| on the card lets you represent data in a standardised
| character format, where successive columns represent
| individual characters (from top to bottom). For example, in
| the IBM 80-column format [0]. The text printed on the top of
| a card makes individual cards human-readable.
|
| When I first encountered computers, in approx 1979, this was
| how we programmed them. Now get off my lawn, with your new-
| fangled glass-teletypes.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card#IBM_80-column_
| for...
| masswerk wrote:
| The method used to print the labels on top of the cards is
| rather fascinating, as well, and involves a mechanical bit
| store for the matrix font. (No electronics involved, all
| electro-mechanical.)
|
| https://www.masswerk.at/misc/card-punch-typography/
| adrian_b wrote:
| Those are the kind of punch cards that were used as the main
| method to introduce programs or any other kind of numeric or
| textual data into old computers, before the mid seventies,
| when the floppy disks became popular.
|
| Like the telephone with a dial disk or the monitor with a CRT
| screen, this is an unfamiliar object for not too old computer
| programmers.
|
| Nevertheless, there was a time when writing any computer
| program required it to be punched on such cards, one
| 80-character line per card, then you could read your program
| like with this Jane Austen example and you had to be
| exceedingly careful to not spill down the cards on the floor,
| or you would have to do a lot of work to sort them again in
| the correct order of the program lines.
| greenyoda wrote:
| > _you would have to do a lot of work to sort them again in
| the correct order of the program_
|
| Actually, there were machines called card sorters that
| could sort cards back into the right order.[1] In the card
| images shown on this page, you can see that there are
| sequential serial numbers in columns 73 - 80, which could
| be used to sort these cards.
|
| Many programming languages, such as Fortran, would ignore
| anything punched after column 72, allowing columns 73 - 80
| to be used for this purpose.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_card_sorter
| shoto_io wrote:
| It's either a form of art or crap!
| masswerk wrote:
| At least, we learn that "Pride and Prejudice" translates into
| 10,711 physical SLOC (source lines of code) or 10.7 KLOC
| (kilo lines of code). A metric good to know, if you want to
| manage a book... ;-)
|
| [0] https://www.ifpug.org/content/documents/Jones-
| LinesofCodeMet...
| smeej wrote:
| I couldn't even figure out what it was trying to be. Is it an
| art collection? A nerdy hobby project, but a type of thing
| people collect and use? Are they stories, or nonfiction?
|
| Maybe being hard to read is part of the point, but if so, I
| think it's made much too well!
| adrian_b wrote:
| See my other reply.
|
| This is a joke / nostalgic memory for old computer
| programmers, who can still remember the time when such
| punched cards where used to store any computer program that
| you wrote, so that a computer would be able to read the
| program.
|
| It was out of the question to write directly the program on a
| terminal connected to the computer (before the invention of
| time sharing) because the running time of the computer was
| too expensive to be acceptable that it should wait until you
| type at a keyboard.
|
| So the computer programs were recorded offline on punched
| cards, then the computer read the program from the punched
| cards at high speed, maybe storing it on a hard disk or on a
| magnetic tape, if you wanted to run the program more than
| once.
| sdoering wrote:
| I believe it is an art project of some nerd who took "Pride and
| Prejudice" and translated it into classical punch cards. I
| stored some of the cards as images on my computer and took some
| reader to see if they really contained what the author stated
| and yes - they translated back into the novel's text.
|
| So it looks like a summer/fun/art project.
|
| I liked it and it fueled a little bit of nostalgia for me.
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(page generated 2021-07-26 23:03 UTC)