| | | >> Oh the days of praying to the Computers Gods that boxes of punch cards produced something more than a single sheet of error results.
Back in the day, when I was learning COBOL, the essence of our grade was a semester-end "project". My project grew to about a full box (2000) cards, all carefully hand-coded, keyed, and pretty much debugged. But because our little RJE facility had no punch, they were NOT duplicated.
Having accomplished my work before the end of semester, I decided a small vacation was due, and promptly headed to New Orleans for a few days off. Before leaving I put my project safely on the top shelf of a closet in the keypunch room, where everyone knew me and knew I was leaving for a few days.
On return, I promptly visited the closet to find my project missing. "Okay, the joke's over. You've had your laugh. Now, where's my stuff?" Icy, blank stares. I stop by my best friend's, who was also in the class, "Okay, Ron. This isn't funny anymore." More icy stares.
After a sleepless night, I return to the RJE room and this is getting serious. I had poured my heart out into that project and I had nothing but a couple of very old source listings. I'm freaking. I go to the window and ask the operator, "You know anything about that box of cards I left in the closet back there? I'm in a mess." He says, "No, I don't think so." Damn. That was my last shot.
I'm leaving, pretty dejected, and he says, "You know, there was someone from the crafts department upstairs that came down here looking for some old punch cards. I told them to look in the keypunch room." I walk in the room upstairs and there are about 2/3 of my cards in the box. Most of the others were spread out on a table, bent, torn, spindled and mutilated.
That was when I learned to always backup everything. |
|
