please empty your brain below
Much later on - depending how long the queue was - you would pick up the stack of cards and a little print out (dot matrix of course) indicating where your programme had errored and then you had to sort through the cards fixing errors and then repeat ad nauseum.
Happy days! :)
[see here]
Surely you mean "as a tax payer"?
I haven't been back since, but friends want to go to the Photography exhibition next year, that will be my first visit for ages and I'll see how it's changed.
I also have a radio from 1935, still working, I am keeping that.
It was sad to see Rugby radio station, where the large VLF 16Khz coil came from, close down. Its vast aerial farm was a familiar site from the M1 motorway.
The LF -60Khz-time signal (for radio controlled clocks) is still transmitted but the transmitter has moved from Rugby to Anthorn Radio Station in Cumbria.
Used to use punch cards at work back in the 1970's. Doing video, TV repairs etc. the cards would be printed with various fault symptoms, and punched holed after the repair was done at the appropriate place. After a few weeks finding several cards with holes lining up at a certain fault indicated a common failure and feedback then sent to manufacturer to take action in the design to stop the fault occurring.
I always used to like the Science Museum but it has changed a lot and seems too commercial nowadays. An IMAX cinema, which takes up a lot of space at the museum, showing feature films, when there are several IMAX cinemas elsewhere, is IMAX a museum piece or a nice money earner.
This doesn't make any sense. Unless you are an iOS or Android developer who might upload apps. But then it still doesn't relate to the situation.
Anyways, good post as always!
re: punch cards, I learned to program, in Fortran, using punch cards. It took sooooo long. Fortunately I had a friend who had access to a teletype machine. So he'd run my programs and I could edit them sort of 'online'. Much quicker.
How things have changed in the past thirty years or so. My Dad used to visit small local museums quite a bit. He said he used to fee really OLD when they had artefacts on display he'd remember using not so long ago. Now I know how he felt!
It is an old airfield and is rammed with stuff. I went there when my employer donated some kit.
Fascinating place but with no plans to allow public access. They should, maybe once or twice a year like London's Transport Museum does with Acton Depot.
C----and nothing could go beyond column 71 except sequence numbers____00002000
C----Unless it was some sort of continuation statement, which then ______X00003000
C----required something in column 72 to show there's more._____________00004000
C----Of course, this will only format correctly in Courier or by cheating_____00005000
C----Kind of mini-tweets._____________ ____________________________00006000
This machine is a [indecipherable]
DO NOT POWER DOWN!!
Perhaps if they did power it down, the whole World Wide Web would come grinding to a halt!
dg writes: They're all still there, for now.
In the end, with great cooperation from the Science Museum and their staff, we did our filming in their wonderful storage facility in West London. See http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/ingenioustours
This grand Victorian building used to be the headquarters of the Post Office Savings Bank, and in a great, now blacked out hall, where rows of clerks once calculated the interest in our savings books, our minder switched on the lights, which flickered on one by one to reveal literally stacks of wonderful mathematical objects on Dexion shelving. It was a memorable privilege to have the run of this room for the day of our filming, and to pick out an Assyrian clay tablet, Egyptian weights, an original platinum metre, and the rest, including an early Sinclair electronic calculator just like the one I’d got at home! Anyone interested in the film can see it at:
https://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/Teachers-TV-Maths-resources-History-of-Maths-6084467/
Plus playing around with punched card equipment in the 1930's room, which was noisy but amazingly efficient, right up to the point when hanging chads would cause a card crash in the sorting machine.
I always wondered (and still do) why the punched-card manufacturers hadn't created an IF-THEN mechanism, along with some kind of loop.
I was like a small boy in a sweet-shop … happy days.
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