What I found most amazing was how the time delay between writing code and then seeing if it worked has shrunk to almost nothing. When I first started in FORTRAN, it was with card decks and you got your results maybe the next day. You learned very quickly to triple check everything and then it would still have a fatal error.

Now you get your results basically instantaneously. Amazing.

stevepaa, that would be infuriating to me. Could we make the argument that the demise of punch cards has led to the establishment of today's "instant gratification" society?

My parents used to tell me that a common prank at their university was to "shuffle someone's cards" when they weren't around.

I started my first job key punching those cards... Oh the fun we had. I have a picture of Jim Morrison that was printed using punch cards. It brings me back... :cool:

Goes along with the trend for "I want it now".

Simply removing one card would do the trick, but every engineer just knew that to touch another's card deck stack/box was next to sacreligious.

I don't believe it has much to do with a "want it now" attitude. The new tools and object give your greater control of the system, but the tasks are just as complex as they ever were. The limits continue to be pushed and the new tools only let us raise the bar.

Old IBM systems required millions of lines of code to operate. Today we make apps like FinalCutPro, Logic, Office, and those projects require the same amount of effort and wouldn't be possible without making significant progress in the tools we use.

Punch cards - what memories. My deck got shuffled when I rode my motorcycle over the train tracks. They were strapped to the back. were..... Talk about 52 pickup.

Another student and I invented the first word processsor I 'd ever used. I was so bad at typing, I figured I could correct my errors with redoing any particular punch card. I proceeded to type in my term paper. Somehow I forgot my "end of data code" at the end of the term paper. The machine read everybody elses punch cards as if they were part of my term paper. 500 pages later somebody noticed there was a problem. OOPS! (Thats's not object oriented programing)

Yup, the new stuff lets me build crappy software faster than ever before. :)

Yup, its quantity not quality. Look at how bloated "windows" has become. Lets laugh at those who remember antique MSDOS and how powerful it was.

Until Windows98se came out, I had only bought upgrades from the previous version of windows/dos... So, when things crashed, I had to format everything, install dos 6.2, then windows 3.0, upgrade to 3.1, upgrade to 95, THEN upgrade to 98. I'll never get those countless hours of frustration back.

The scary thing is, I am just now finishing a project to migrate data from a massive, barely-documented 60's-70's punchcard app into our system (COTS app that does the same kind of stuff). Of course they don't actually use paper cards anymore, but it has the same architecture, only now they keypunch/edit the card data in an app not much more sophisticated than a mainframe text line editor (!?!?!?!) and run a "nightly batch update".

I have never been so flustered in my entire career; imagine trying to move enough card layouts to fill a 100+ page book, full of little 1-2 character "mystery codes", to a radically different Oracle-based data model, OLTP middle-tier app, and web UI.

I've had to deal with all kinds of legacy stuff in my day, and did some heavy mainframe work for 10 years, but this project is kicking my a$$. It might help if the people who actually built the app had documented it and/or weren't retired or dead...but no such luxury.

I did a lot of procedural C programming in college as an engineering student writing on neural networks. Also wrote a lot of assembly in micro processor interfacing classes. I never wound up on the engineering side of things, so its mostly database stuff for me these days

C/C++
For SQL, I work daily in Oracle, DB2, or SQL Server databases
SQR
PeopleCode
Assembly :eek: NEVER AGAIN!
FoxPro
VB
I can read COBOL, but it makes me nervous when Im asked to. its a clear indicator that paychecks are not calculating somewhere.