On Fri, 29 Aug 2008 23:28:53 +0100
Hugo Mills <hugo@???> wrote:
> So I'm meant to punch holes in the small children and feed them
> into the loom instead, then?
I was quite good with an 80 column card hand punch back in
1948/9, but the two punch operators we had could do twice as many per
hour as I could turn out.
My job was setting up the mechanical sorter to analyse the the cards
once punched so I didn't need a lot of punching speed and I mostly
used the hand punch to replicate damaged cards.
I can't remember if it was Hollerith or IBM kit we had but I
do remember it was not a good idea to drop a box of cards ;-(
I was working back then for an advertising agency which did a lot
of market research and the punched cards were used to record the
answers obtained from the public. My boss at the time had the title
'Mathematician'
--
John Lewis
using Debian Sid with windowmaker for a nicer desktop
