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| Thread ID: 53132 | 2005-01-08 07:36:00 | Western Digital vs punch cards... | Blade2 (6577) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 311988 | 2005-01-10 04:31:00 | "eh?" I wondered who would bite on that. :D How can you go back to punch cards if you don't know those ? EBCDIC and BCD are the two main character codes used on cards. IBM 029 punches produced EBCDIC (Extended binary coded decimal) cards and the older 024 punches produced BCD cards. Of course when the cards were for a computer which used EBCDIC, you became good at multi-punching ("+,5,8" and "-,5,8" are permanently programmed into my fingers). On 8 level paper tape, ASCII was just about universal. |
Graham L (2) | ||
| 311989 | 2005-01-10 04:37:00 | How much would a 120GB punch card running at 6Kph with a seek time of 2000ms cost? | george12 (7) | ||
| 311990 | 2005-01-10 04:49:00 | Gigabytes were not common in cards . What you got was 80 columns, with 12 positions in each . Normally, you used only 72 columns, with sequence numbers punched in the last 8 . Anyone who ever dropped a box of 2000 cards without sequence numbers suddenly learned why they were a good thing . Even a small deck of a few hundred (insecurely) held by rubber bands could take a bit of restoring . The read time was pretty good . Fast readers took the cards in wide side on, and read all 80 columns at once . I think the main reader took 1400 cards/min . A punch, the size of a small desk, cost $4-5000 in the 1970s . That was about the price of a new small car . For many years before there were any "computer" computers, IBM and ICT made card calculators which had respectable data processing capability . A lot of the calculations for the Manhatton Project atomic bomb development were done on card equipment . Richard Feynmann worked on some of that . |
Graham L (2) | ||
| 311991 | 2005-01-10 05:07:00 | Card Punches (www.columbia.edu) looked like this. | Graham L (2) | ||
| 311992 | 2005-01-10 06:06:00 | A few years ago I sold 2 card readers and a punch, for $48.00 Took a reasonable sized freight truck to carry them. |
godfather (25) | ||
| 311993 | 2005-01-10 18:47:00 | How much would a 120GB punch card running at 6Kph with a seek time of 2000ms cost? I like ur style george, obviously the punch card thing was a joke, when I compared the two I was wondering if it would be better to use punch cards than WD... Oh and thanks for the computer history lesson Mr Blaise Pascal. Nope did not experience punch cards, but one of my tutors when I was doing my IT degree used them. Thanks everyone |
Blade2 (6577) | ||
| 311994 | 2005-01-11 01:03:00 | Yeah... But why would you buy one of those godfather? Anyway bash.org comes to the rescue: "I don't use hard drives. I just have 30 slaves in my basement and force them to memorize numbers" |
george12 (7) | ||
| 311995 | 2005-01-11 02:00:00 | More reliable storage than disk drives? You do need to keep the mice away, though. Space can be a problem: a box of 2000 cards can hold about 226kB of binary, or 144kB of text. |
Graham L (2) | ||
| 311996 | 2005-01-11 06:03:00 | About to give up and go back to punch cards... The Hollerith punch cards were very good.... as I clearly recall ! :lol: |
Misty (368) | ||
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