Programming with Punched Cards

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/fisk.pdf

It must have been about 1973. Life at IBM was good, and I was busy doing whatever it is that engineers did then. Suddenly, in the life of our project, something came up that called for a computer program that did not exist, and I was asked to create it. My boss knew I’d never written a program before; not unusual since in those days there were very few engineers who knew how to program.

Walking past programmer’s offices I could see that they had stacks and stacks of punched cards and boxes and boxes of them in their offices. They had nice, neat boxes stacked in corners and ragged-looking ones poked under tables. Some boxes had pink cards, others held blue cards, and more had those boring cream colored cards.

Sure enough, each card now had typed on the top of the card a line of text that agreed with one line from the coding sheet I had given her. Now what? I knew the next step was to feed the deck of cards into our IBM 360 computer. Clearly I needed a little guidance, so I went back to Bob and asked what I should do next with my program. "First," he said, pointing to the small stack of punched cards I had set on his desk, "That deck of cards isn't yet a program. That deck of punched cards is what we call a source deck. Your source deck is a description, very detailed and very technical, but still just a description of what you want your program to do."

 

  

It didn't take long before the other program finished and mine started. Then, almost immediately, I got another stack of paper back. Again no program deck! In fact, the one-eighth inch stack of computer printout showed the exact same error message I had seen earlier. Could it be that it wasn’t the computer? Something that I had done? I trudged back to my desk and glumly pulled out my How to Write a Program book again. And, after a while I found that one of the cards in my source deck was missing a needed comma. I remember grumbling that if the computer could figure out that a comma was needed, and exactly which comma was missing, why didn't it fix it for me? Dumb computers!