Key Punch Cards - FORTRAN

Is there a word for someone who waxes 

nostalgic about keypunch cards?

I mean, BESIDES codger, fogey and geezer?

It was in the early 1970s in my Computer Programming class at good old Belleville High School that we were introduced to the coding sequence of FORTRAN and the wonder of keypunch cards.

The keypunch machine ... that punched the holes in the card for each letter you typed and later read the card to perform a task, was not as big as a Univac computer - which would have taken a whole classroom, but was about half that size.

A Keypunch Card

In those days, our first question was What's an Abacus?

From there, we pretended to have computers for which we would write programming on the keypunch cards and I remember a lot zeroes and 1s and you left about 10 digits between coding lines.

Maybe that's how programmers still write programs?

Once during our year of Computer Programming class we actually visited the keypunch room and got to type our cards out and see whether or not our program worked.

My older sister worked down in Newark at one of the big insurance companies - I'm thinking Mutual Benefit, but it could have been Mutual of Omaha? - where she was a keypunch operator. That, of course, was back in the days before spelling was corrected holistically. Anyway, when she got married and moved to Ashtabula, Ohio, she got a job as a keypunch operator at Carlysle's Department store uptown.

Is there a word for someone who waxes nostalgic about keypunch cards?

Oh, now I know: Baby boomer.

Keypunch Machine at Columbia University

Keypunch Machine on Wikipedia

Copyright © 2008 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission.

BACK TO SCHOOL: INSTITUTIONAL GREEN

One of the best things about Amazon.com is that you can look for out of print titles and if they are available buy them and be reading them in no time.

In the old days, you might have had to go to a used book store and browse the stacks for hours to find a treasure.



(Reminds me of the argument in The Strawberry Statement, Notes of A College Revolutionary by James Simon Kunen - where he passes a Hard-To-Find-Records store and argues that if the record is in the store then it can't be too hard to find. But I digress.)

One of those lost treasures I recovered recently was a copy of a book I lost in 1971 or so right in front of my house while I was playing street hockey.

I had laid the book - Our Time is Now; Notes From the High School Underground, edited by John Birmingham - down with my school books and later when I got inside it had gone missing.