[HN Gopher] Rabbit hole: stumbling across two Portuguese punched...
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Rabbit hole: stumbling across two Portuguese punched cards
Author : jgrahamc
Score : 175 points
Date : 2024-10-08 17:19 UTC (1 days 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!
| tdeck wrote:
| The job goes back much further than you probably think!
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PqLCHjAI000&pp=ygUQbG9vbSBjYXJ.
| ..
| 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.
| jdblair wrote:
| The term "octet" is used in IETF documentation (for IP
| addresses, for example) to be specific that the byte is 8
| bits in length. Historically the size of a "byte" on a
| system was machine-dependent. The industry coalesced around
| the 8-bit byte, and differentiated it from "machine word"
| in the 70s and 80s.
|
| Edit: I just checked wikipedia, and this is described
| there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte
| toast0 wrote:
| Like the sibling says, octet is useful when in a networking
| context, because bytes weren't uniformly sized, but also
| because communications protocols were sometimes only 7-bit.
|
| Serial ports and modems often operated in that mode, and
| UUCP influenced mail and newsgroups to only use 7-bit data;
| requiring encoding for data with the high bit set.
| Protocols that specify octets are dealing with 8-bit bytes
| and don't have to deal with that.
| hammock wrote:
| Spain and France as well. Computadora was a Latin American
| thing
| forinti wrote:
| In Brazil the vocabulary changed a lot from the 80s onward too.
|
| I was used to reading everything in English, so Brazilian
| computer books and magazines would always read strange to me.
| Then in the 90s everything just moved to American vocabulary.
|
| The strangest word I recall in this context is the use of
| "alca" for handle.
| zorked wrote:
| Brazil had a bad problem with technical books being
| translated by generalist translators who just looked up the
| word in the dictionary and used the first translation they
| saw. So many translations are extremely hard to read because
| of that.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Yep. The literal translation for "edge-triggered flip-flop"
| still stands as one of the weirdest, most bizarre things I
| ever read as a Continental Portuguese student.
|
| Never read another Brazilian technical translation ever
| agin.
| 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.
| pedrosorio wrote:
| They were talking about 2002 when the Euro was introduced
| and "it felt like" prices doubled overnight. At the time
| (as you can see in the chart) inflation was below 4% per
| year.
| anthk wrote:
| Ditto in Spanish with the former currency, the peseta.
|
| 1 euro = 166 PTS, 6 euro ~ 1000 PTS, the basic banknote.
|
| Guess what happened. Exactly. Bread costing 100 PTS began
| to cost... 166, 1 euro.
| kgwgk wrote:
| Bread didn't go up 66% overnight.
|
| It did go up 66%... but it took more than 15 years:
| https://dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/6407661.pdf
| anthk wrote:
| In some places, it did over a year.
| kgwgk wrote:
| In your mind :-)
| anthk wrote:
| Tell that to lots of local shops there on what happened
| between 2002 and 2005 :)
|
| And, of course, bars.
| kgwgk wrote:
| We were talking about bread. And "between 2002 and 2005"
| is somewhat longer than "over a year".
| jmrm wrote:
| It didn't happed specifically with bread, as other
| comment exposed, but it happened with other products,
| specially in bars, cafes, and restaurants.
|
| On the other hand, inflation affected different products
| in different ways. I remember how in January 1st 2002 a
| small bag of Ruffles Jamon costed EUR0.15 in a kiosk and
| now it's around EUR0.50 (or even more) in same places
| (and now contains less product and more air), and I doubt
| any other product that are nearly 300% percent inflation
| since 2002 (outside homes sadly)
| 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.
| tumetab1 wrote:
| I was intrigued by the value so did some research.
|
| I would guess the 15$/hour value was chosen to approximate an
| average gross salary. The annualized payment would be 31200$[1]
| and it seems the average annual salary was around 30359$.
|
| Updated to 2022 values the annual gross pay would be 10033EUR
| [3], current average annual gross salary is 20483EUR [4].
|
| [1] 15$ * 2080 hours [2]
| https://www.repository.utl.pt/bitstream/10400.5/9819/1/ee-ja...
| [3]
| https://www.ine.pt/xportal/xmain?xpid=INE&xpgid=ipc&xlang=en
| [4] https://www.pordata.pt/pt/estatisticas/salarios-e-
| pensoes/sa...
| 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)
| anthk wrote:
| Orden in Spanish means both command (mandate, instruction)
| and order (as from sort).
| forinti wrote:
| Exactly the same as the Portuguese word ordem.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| _ordem e progresso_ = sorting and soup?
| https://www.progresso.com
| kgwgk wrote:
| So it means both order and order.
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/order
|
| 1. (countable) Arrangement, disposition, or sequence.
|
| [...]
|
| 5. (countable) A command.
|
| [...]
| jordigh wrote:
| No, "ordinateur" was a marketing term created for IBM that
| meant to evoke godliness, from the somewhat archaic phrase,
| "Dieu qui met de l'ordre dans le monde", God who sets the
| world in order.
|
| https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2005/04/15/16-avril-
| 1...
|
| Spain calqued the word into ordenador while most of Latin
| America calqued computadora from the USA.
| pjmlp wrote:
| As Portuguese reaching 50, that is also native speaker in
| Spanish as well, this is the very first time I have seen any
| Portuguese content using the Spanish/French variant, instead of
| "computador".
| 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
| anthk wrote:
| I love these old advertisements. BTW, even in late and mid 80's,
| there were adverts on the Spanish Reader's Digest on courses
| about computers. I rememember showing images of both PDP front
| panels and maybe Altair 8800, not IBM PC's. These were top notch
| stuff for big corporations and banks filling their offices.
|
| BTW, on the 'computadora' term, these looked outdated, and to
| anyone non-Latin American descent here 'computadora' would mean
| an old IBM mainframe the size of two wardrobes and more.
| pantulis wrote:
| I remember those things being called "cerebros electronicos".
| anthk wrote:
| More like the 60's and 70's, and infamously known because of
| the comic books. "Electronic Brains" in the 80's, maybe until
| 1981 or 1982.
| lubujackson wrote:
| My dad used to work in a college lab that used punch cards. I am
| actually using one as a bookmark right now - they make great
| bookmarks!
| toast0 wrote:
| Blank, unpunched punchcards are a great size for taking notes
| too.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| so.. those real cards that fell off .by.gravity., were the
| originals photographed in the textbook?
| jgrahamc wrote:
| No, they were not the originals because if you look at the book
| versions they do not have the printed In Es Me logo on them.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| then.. what, someone learned punching? from what's in that
| book? The text punched matches exactly..
|
| Or is that some secret "code" to open gates of XYZ?
|
| p.s. it is a rabbit hole :)
| jgrahamc wrote:
| From my blog: _So, it looks like the cards were examples
| (perhaps from the training course) drawn from the book._
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