Just to make life more interesting, in the early days anything other than letters and numbers were often different for different manufacturers. I seem to recall Bell Labs buying a custom "print chain" in order to get enough special characters to handle printing programming languages (Doug, this was almost before my time -- do you remember the details?). I remember there was a device that could print the contents of a punched card on the punched card itself. It had a number of quirks, including that it only printed 40 (or was it 50) columns of the 80-column card, and had virtually no special symbols. We quickly became adept at looking at the garbled subsection of the card and intuiting which card it really was...
I became all to familiar with that card printer during one summer job. I was working for Stan Brown, who had written a symbolic algebra system in assembler. It was a real tour-de-force, and contained several thousand punched cards. When I started my summer job, Stan made a copy of all the cards for me, so we each had a copy. Shortly after I arrived, the comp center announced a brand-new feature -- permanent disc storage! (actually, I think it was a drum...). Stan and I were excited about the possibility that we could edit the single copy of the program and not have to keep our copies in sync, so we loaded the cards into the file. There was a crude editor that would allow you to make one pass through the file in order, deleting lines or adding card images after certain line numbers. You needed a printout of the file that told you the line numbers, but the printout was much easier to handle than the punched cards...
A couple of days after the program was safely on the drum, Stan threw out his card deck, assuming that I had the backup copy. At about the same time, I threw out my card deck, assuming that Stan had a copy. We discovered this the hard way when I tried to do a fairly substantial edit of the file on disc. It turned out that the editor only worked correctly when you wrote the edited file into a new file. If you didn't specify a new file, it attepted to do the edit on top of the file as it edited, creating a jumble of fragments of the original file -- typically 3-10 lines. By the time we realized this, the file was good and trashed, and we had no backup. But we did have a listing...
So I punched out the mangled file onto cards, and fed them through the card printer, and spent the weekend comparing line by line -- in many cases, I could simply move the punched cards into the proper order, but I did plenty of card punching as well. Amazingly, I managed to get it working again, and Stan and I kept updated punched cards throughout the summer...
Steve
----- Original Message -----
From:
"Random832" <random832@fastmail.com>
To:
<tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
Cc:
Sent:
Thu, 05 Apr 2018 22:03:40 -0400
Subject:
Re: [TUHS] long lived programs
On Thu, Apr 5, 2018, at 17:38, Bakul Shah wrote:
> May be case itself is such a historical artifact? AFAIK all non-roman
> scripts are without case distinction.
Greek and Cyrillic both have cases. And the Hiragana/Katakana distinction in Japanese is similar to case in some ways (including limited computer systems using only one)
Full list of scripts in unicode that have case distinctions (based on analyzing character names): Adlam, Armenian, Cherokee, Coptic, Cyrillic, Deseret, Georgian, Glagolitic, Greek, Latin, Old Hungarian, Osage, and Warang Citi.