🚀 go-pugleaf

Card story of my own; while working as a summer student at the Royal
Greenwich Observatory, fellow students and I decided to liven things
up come April 1.  Aside from the fake IAU posting I put on the bulletin
board, we did a plot of the words "APRIL FOOL", only we plotted the
words using dot primitives from the plot package.  This was in the days
when only operators were considered competent to remove paper from a pen
plotter, so the plotter was in the machine room, along with the computer
(an ICL 1903T, running the ancient George 3 Exec).   Another student had
discovered that if you enlarged the dots an ungodly amount, they looked like
snails.  The plot itself was about 3' across and took an hour to finish.
Anyway, we didn't want the dots to be plotted in sequence, you understand,
'cos the purpose would've become apparent long before the end of the plot.
So we wanted to randomize the order the dots were plotted in.  After a
while, we figured the best way was to make one card for each coordinate point,
and then we tossed the stack on the floor and messed them around.  Made sure
that the deck was *not* sequence-checked on input.  The operators didn't
catch on until the plot was nearly done. 

This is news.  This is your       |    Peter Scott, NASA/JPL/Caltech
brain on news.  Any questions?    |    (p...@aristotle.jpl.nasa.gov)

	I'm surprised that no one has mentioned binary patches to cards.
We used to have little red squares of Scotch tape that could be used to
plug up holes already punched in cards.  Back in the 704 days it might take
6 hours to get your program recompiled, so if you found that you just needed
to change one instruction (or address) it was worth while to correct the
bad instruction in the binary deck and resubmit for a test run.  You couldn't
copy a row-binary card on a keypunch, so you'd plug up the bad holes and
punch any new bits you needed (usually on a manual desktop card punch --
a gimmick that held one card in a spring-loaded carriage, with stops for each
column and 12 keys, one for each row).

	Patched cards had a tendency to lose the patches, which would then
gum up the card reader, so the operators eventually got them banned.

--

A.T.Young, Astronomy Department, San Diego State University, San Diego CA 92182

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