My firt job out of college in the early 1990s was at an equipment manufacturer who was still using them. They had a big chart on the wall titled "punch-card elimination" and a line trending down, but it wasn't at zero yet.
My work there was all new code and didn't involve any of that, however.
I remember seeing stacks of cards being carried into/out of the university "computing center" in the mid 1980s, on more than a couple of occasions. Though in retrospect, these were probably just old programs that had been in various professors offices since the mid 70s, being taken to get read into some disk in the mainframe.
We still learned how to use them in the 80’s high school computer classes, mostly because we had a balance of CP/M plus card-reader/early DOS machines, eventually .. in the labs. Rich kid schools had Apples though, and some of them also had card readers for BASIC ..
Punch cards are still a form of digital storage, mind.
Also a form of storing things on paper
Reminds me of an old fortune cookie message or meme, something like "digital data is made from analog parts".
I threw out all my punch cards. Wish I'd kept at least a listing!
I find punch cards being used in old engineering books I buy from the 60s.
Maybe write them again?
> unless they used punch cards
For MS-DOS?
Not likely. Punch cards disappeared around the end of 1976.
My firt job out of college in the early 1990s was at an equipment manufacturer who was still using them. They had a big chart on the wall titled "punch-card elimination" and a line trending down, but it wasn't at zero yet.
My work there was all new code and didn't involve any of that, however.
I remember seeing stacks of cards being carried into/out of the university "computing center" in the mid 1980s, on more than a couple of occasions. Though in retrospect, these were probably just old programs that had been in various professors offices since the mid 70s, being taken to get read into some disk in the mainframe.
We still learned how to use them in the 80’s high school computer classes, mostly because we had a balance of CP/M plus card-reader/early DOS machines, eventually .. in the labs. Rich kid schools had Apples though, and some of them also had card readers for BASIC ..
2 replies →
My college used them for PL/I and IBM Assembly language programming classes until 1982. Cards were used well into the mid-80s.
We still used them in the university as late as in 2010...
...as writing paper.