On Thu, Feb 13, 2020 at 12:34 PM Timothe Litt <litt@ieee.org> wrote:
OTOH, and probably more consistent with your experience, card
equipment was
almost unheard of when the DEC HW ran Unix...
You're probably right about that Tim, but DEC world was mostly TOPS/TENEX/ITS and UNIX. But you would think that since a huge usage of UNIX systems were as RJE for IBM gear at AT&T. In fact, that was one of the 'justifications' if PWB. I'm thinking of the machine rooms I saw in MH, WH and IH, much less DEC, Tektronix or my university time. It's funny, I do remember a lot of work to emulate card images and arguments between the proper character set conversions, but I just don't remember seeing actual card readers or punches on the PDP-11s, only on the IBM, Univac and CDC systems.
As other people have pointed out, I'm sure they must have been around, but my world did not have them.