[HN Gopher] Rabbit hole: stumbling across two Portuguese punched...
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Rabbit hole: stumbling across two Portuguese punched cards
Author : jgrahamc
Score : 86 points
Date : 2024-10-08 17:19 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.jgc.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.jgc.org)
| rcarmo wrote:
| Look up a guy called Pedro Aniceto - he'll tell you so many
| stories of when those cards were current here (he used to courier
| them across town when he was a kid)
| pedroaniceto wrote:
| ;) Punching cards was in fact my first "decent" job. There were
| the "punchers" and "the programmers". A real social battle...
| airstrike wrote:
| I feel like you should submit your own blog posts here!
| cafard wrote:
| Very cool. Also good to see someone else still writing Perl.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| Mostly because I know it's installed, I can remember pretty
| much the entire language, and because I'd probably use Python
| instead but I've been bitten by some environment thing too many
| times.
| pedroaniceto wrote:
| Yes, a single variable notification in code, could cost
| THOUSANDS just because someone would punch ONE card with the
| new data, compile it (with no errors), save it on a cassete
| tape, (write the label of the tape with a new version number)
| and deliver it to the customer. There were no monitors.
| Computers would have a "BOITIER" (a rectangular box of
| coloured lamps) who coould have 3 meanings, ON, OFF and
| BLINKING. We're talking about 16 light points, and the
| interpretation of those lights would have the answer for the
| completed action. 3 whites and 3 reds would mean "No errors
| on compiling". But that action only verified syntax. Logic
| was another department :)
| thih9 wrote:
| Mind blowing. 50 years later we are putting VM in a VM in a
| VM to send videos of funny cats along with bank
| transactions across the world to everyone's wireless pocket
| computer.
| gpvos wrote:
| It still has great whipuptitude.
| zorked wrote:
| I didn't know they used to call computers "ordenadores" in
| Portugal. Interesting.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| They appear to have in this book, but computadores seems to
| have taken over.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Ordinateur in French, still.
| nsbk wrote:
| Ordenador in Spanish, still.
| pedroaniceto wrote:
| 'till the 80's, french was the computer dominating language.
| Terms like "Octeto" (portuguese for byte) were derived from
| french glossary (tehy had laws to prevent the english tech term
| colonization and still today they have a french word for every
| english counterpart). So, "Ordenadores" was pretty common. And
| before electronics took over, we had "Electrologica", refering
| mixed hardware like Burroughs or Gestetner.
| titanomachy wrote:
| English-speaking programmers still say "octet" for byte
| sometimes, for example when talking about IP addresses.
| hammock wrote:
| Spain and France as well. Computadora was a Latin American
| thing
| zahlman wrote:
| >indicates that Joao A. Fernandes is paid 15$000 (15 Portuguese
| escudos) per hour
|
| From the linked Wikipedia article, the escudo was replaced with
| the Euro in 2002, at a rate of about 200 escudos to the Euro.
| Seems like they had quite a bit of inflation in those three or so
| decades.
| ajose_mr wrote:
| There was:
| https://www.inflationtool.com/rates/portugal/historical?utm_...
|
| I have heard a few stories about those times in the 70s and 80s
| where people were selling their properties and putting the
| money in the bank which was paying 20% interest.
|
| A bitter lesson on the difference between the nominal Vs real
| value of money rapidly ensued.
| nodja wrote:
| I'm portuguese and there's an oddity in either this chart or
| my memory.
|
| When we transitioned to the euro it seemed most shops
| straight up converted from escudo to eurocent. So if
| something cost 50 escudos it would cost 50 cents. I was a
| teen at the time so I remember having to pay double for
| breakfast and arcade coinop games and people blaming the
| inflation for the doubled price of stuff. Yet the chart
| doesn't represent this. I know the price of electronics for
| example wasn't doubled so I wasn't expect a 100% inflation
| rate or anything, but I still feels it should've been higher
| than 4%.
| xenadu02 wrote:
| Uh 3 years of 22% inflation (give or take) doubles prices.
| When you're a young kid it sure would seem like everything
| got twice as expensive really fast, especially since most
| stores and manufacturers aren't raising prices every week
| to track inflation.
|
| If I estimate the 10-ish years of 20% +/- 3% that's around
| 7x which I can't imagine.
| nunobrito wrote:
| 15 escudos was roughly 7 cents of Euro in those days. You could
| buy one chewing gum with that kind of money. An expresso coffee
| would cost 50 escudos on the turn of the century.
| keybpo wrote:
| Found a reference to ENIASA - Instituto de Informatica de
| Engenharia SARL (computer science engeneering). Rereading your
| post, I'm not entirely sure if it was just an academic publishing
| from maybe the same group or if a new branch for computers
| derived from the mecanograph educational offers. Curious use of
| ordenador istead of computador as it is nowadays, makes me wonder
| if it was an early adoption of the term computer.
|
| It was submitted for registration and approved in 1970, according
| to Diario da Republica (similar to Federal Register in the US):
| https://files.dre.pt/gratuitos/3s/1970/09/1970d210s000.pdf , page
| 4, line 82 of that table. Or here:
| https://i.imgur.com/GyKPamu.png
| jgrahamc wrote:
| Yeah, I found that too. But that's all I found.
| pedroaniceto wrote:
| Read my comment below about the french language domination
| nunobrito wrote:
| It's still "ordenador" in Spain and "ordinateur" in French.
| Interesting that we moved forward to computer over the years.
| ithkuil wrote:
| Is this because these early computers were more often used to
| keep tabs and sort things (put things in order) rather than
| merely compute things?
|
| (I'm aware that in order to perform those tasks the
| processing unit will also have to perform arithmetic
| operations)
| pedroaniceto wrote:
| Those were the days...
| Animats wrote:
| The book has a picture of the IBM 2321 Data Cell Drive, 1964 to
| 1975.[1] That's an exotic peripheral for the original IBM
| System/360, a tape strip library. Before disks got big, there
| were various mechanical kludges to select storage media from a
| library and move them to a read/write unit. IBM had several such
| mechanical systems. This one was a commercial product with modest
| success.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_2321_Data_Cell
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