Alternative to BSP's.

[Dan/Panther]

We've discussed the BSP's and the relative rarity of them, and I mentioned a card system that we had at GM.
I found the following cards for sale on ebay that are identical to the ones we used at GM, except they are Bell System. It appears it was service provided back in the 50's for archiving the paperwork. I wonder if the company is still around and if maybe they have the originals archived.
These would be the archived versions of the printed BSP's. Has anyone run across any of these?

D/P

[HarrySmith]

WOW, those are amazing
I had neer seen or heard of them. Those are for the very early computers are they not
Did you get them

[Dan/Panther]

Harry;
No I didn't bid they are still up for auction.
These cards are double page, so the 150 cards for sale will reflect 300 pages and are about the size of two decks of cards.
I would like to find out who provided the service, or was it in house ?
The cards are identical in color and shape as the ones from GM.
D/P

[Jim Stettler]

I used to have some of those. I had the regular and the "Green" (post divestiture) cards.  You can view them with a microfiche reader.

I assume that Bell did them in-house, I think there were probably companies that provide this service for other organizations.
Jim

[gpo706]

Aren't these FORTRAN cards?

I bought a dozen for a guy I work with as he's into early computers, apparently its 80kb a card...

Honeywell used them. See "Billion Dollar Brain".

[paul-f]

My father worked for Eastman Kodak for many years.  As I recall, they were promoters of several microfilming systems, including many that involved aperture cards.  In the 1960s-70s many Fortune 500 and engineering-oriented comapnies used these systems.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_card

Interesting background here:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microform
 

[paul-f]

Aren't these FORTRAN cards?

Close.  FORTRAN was a programming language that was popular during punch card days.

Formats can be found here:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card#Card_formats

When in high school our physics teacher arranged for our class to tour a local computer center.  I wrote my first computer program in FORTRAN, keypunched it, and ran it on an IBM computer at Xerox.  It felt like rocket science.  In those days, the few computers around were in the bowels of large corporations and cost much more than mere mortals or school districts could afford. 

Who knew then that later in life we'd have more personal computers at home than residents?  The last two we acquired were free -- handed down from friends who upgraded.  Any of them have many times  more power than the IBM mainframe that processed those punched cards.

[Bill]

I think those cards were 80 bytes, not 80 Kbytes. As I recall, there were 80 columns, each of which had several (20, more or less?) positions that couyld be punched out. In Fortran, each card contained one line of code - one Fortran instruction - or a small number of data values. It was amazing how compact computer programs and data sets were in those days, compared to the mind-boggling behemouths of today.

Bill

[paul-f]

Correct.  A full card like this had 80 columns.  By one definition of "byte" that would equal 80 bytes.

Aperature cards like this had fewer columns available for data, as it was bad form to keypunch over the film image.  It could make your schematic or data table difficult to read.  The punches typically included identifying information, so that a particular card or group of cards could be easily selected from a large tray of cards by a mechanical card sorter.

There were special formats for cards depending on their purpose -- program or data.  Each programming language had its own format.  In FORTRAN, a statement did not have to fit on one card, but could continue on to following cards.

In the sample pre-printed FORTRAN card shown below:

• a C in column 1 indicated the info on the card was a comment and was to be ignored by the compiler.
• Columns 1-5 -- the Fortran statement number
• Column 6 indicated the card was a continuation of the previous card. (For long statements that had to span cards.)
• Columns 7-72 -- The Fortran Statement (or continuation)
• Columns 73-80 -- Identification

The identification field was typically used to indicate the programmer and the position of the card in a program.  It often included combination of the programmer's initials followed by sequential numbers.  Programs could easily run into thousands of cards. If a card deck was dropped on the way to the computer (heaven forbid!), the cards could be manually sorted or run through a mechanical card sorter to be put back in order.

Other programming languages had their own formats.  Some of the more popular in FORTRAN days were COBOL, SNOBOL, RPG and Basic.  There were more languages than you could throw a stick at:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages_by_category

Due to the speed, storage limits and price of computers then, it was literally cheaper to pay a team of programmers to spend several weeks trying to cut a few instructions out of a program or a few butes out of a data record (that would be replicated thousands of times) than to pay for the processing time for an "inefficient" program.  The economics have been reversed, so now it's much cheaper to throw more hardware at problems.

[JorgeAmely]

As of 1992, you could still write Fortran programs, without cards, for the popular VAX line of computers.

[paul-f]

I haven't looked in years, but a quick internet search produces lists of Fortran compilers and interpreters (who else knows the difference?) that appear to be currently available.

It was also interesting to learn that there was apparently a standards revision effort as recently as 2008.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran#Fortran_2008

My first computer program was in Fortran II and later in my career I was invovled in an effort to define standard Fortran language extensions for real-time process control applications. 

[JorgeAmely]

As of 1992, you could still write Fortran programs, without cards, for the popular VAX line of computers.

It used to be called Fortran 77. Sold by Digital Equipment Corporation.

[gpo706]

MANNIX

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF_49tWPNWA