ZombieCake
Well-known member
Ok perhaps a bit of a tangental view. There's an input and an output, what more do you need?!?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTnGI6Knw5Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTnGI6Knw5Q
There's life in card fed analogue computers yet...
- Thread starter ZombieCake
- Start date
Graigwen
Well-known member
Boy Engineer
Active member
crickleymal
New member
Not quite the same but marvelous
Wintergaten Marble Machine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvUU8joBb1Q
Wintergaten Marble Machine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvUU8joBb1Q
Boy Engineer
Active member
mch said:Boy Engineer said:
Wow - didn't even know that there was such a thing! Do you make much money with it?
I?ve not yet had my organ out for money, so to speak. It?s been out and about at a local Arts festival without the police being called.
first-ade
Member
I was speaking to a caver recently who was visiting the NPC, who had a collection of punch paper reels who was going to get a friend to digitise them. They were fascinating to look at.
Martin is currently making a version 2 of his marble machine and it's fascinating to watch him build it and solve all the problems of the first one.
Sent from my MotoG3 using Tapatalk
Martin is currently making a version 2 of his marble machine and it's fascinating to watch him build it and solve all the problems of the first one.
Sent from my MotoG3 using Tapatalk
Graigwen
Well-known member
bograt said:One of my first jobs back in the sixties was punching the holes in punch cards for computers, a really soul destroying job
I suppose you could say I was employed in the early computer business!
In 1971 the Canadian mining company I was working for sent me to London to interrogate the Imperial College computer for geochemical information. I did this by hand writing my requirements onto forms, these were then passed to a team of girls who the next day provided me with punched cards. The cards were fed into the computer, this produced a crude display from which I extracted numbers of interest and hand copied them onto plastic map transparencies I had brought with me. At the time it seemed very modern, now it sounds like the Stone Age.
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crickleymal
New member
The chads (I think they're called) from punch tape were used on model railways as slates for roofs.
I once used chads very successfully to do some water tracing back in the 1960's and '70's when I worked at Rolls-Royce in the computer department and the chads were easy to collect up in bags and take away. We were using paper tape at the time so the chads were tiny and flimsy, unlike the punched card chads.
The "collectors" I used were pieces of old nylon tights, fashioned into bags and rigged at the resurgence. I even managed to do some tracing from several sources at once using different coloured chads. You only needed to collect one single chad to prove the connection but, of course, it only worked where you had open stream-way between sink and rising.
I think I got the idea from some scientific papers about using different coloured spores. No money for buying spores so thought I'd give chads a try - and it worked fine. There was a great deal of water sloshing around in the Manifold Valley at the time and all the resurgences were on the bank of the main river so any escaped chads were whisked away on the current and dispersed - the tiny pieces of paper were pretty well bio-degradable anyway.
The "collectors" I used were pieces of old nylon tights, fashioned into bags and rigged at the resurgence. I even managed to do some tracing from several sources at once using different coloured chads. You only needed to collect one single chad to prove the connection but, of course, it only worked where you had open stream-way between sink and rising.
I think I got the idea from some scientific papers about using different coloured spores. No money for buying spores so thought I'd give chads a try - and it worked fine. There was a great deal of water sloshing around in the Manifold Valley at the time and all the resurgences were on the bank of the main river so any escaped chads were whisked away on the current and dispersed - the tiny pieces of paper were pretty well bio-degradable anyway.
kay
Well-known member
bograt said:One of my first jobs back in the sixties was punching the holes in punch cards for computers, a really soul destroying job
I suppose you could say I was employed in the early computer business!
Not quite punched cards but a successor (this was early 70s): I enjoyed being able to hold a punched paper tape up to the window, scan along it and say to a colleague "I think that's where the error in your programme is - you've got a comma instead of a 1"
The worst disaster was dropping the middle out of a big roll of paper tape - you had to unroll it completely to be able to re-roll it without twists. You needed a long corridor and a lot of patience.
We also had a little device for mending paper tape - a satisfyingly heavy metal shape with spikes to fit the two pieces of tape on, and some sticky tape with holes all the way across to fasten the pieces together without obscuring any of the holes in the tape.
StealthYak
New member
Programmers today will never know the joy of dropping a deck of punched cards and trying to sort the lines back into the right order.
Simon Wilson
New member
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlJns3fPItE
ZombieCake
Well-known member
kay
Well-known member
We used cards both for inputting data into a computer, and for creating catalogues etc which could be printed on a "flexiprinter".
I remember one of the scientists spending a morning typing in her data for input into a Fortran program, which required 6 spaces at the start of each line. Somewhere during the course of the morning, a clerk (who was there to use the flexiprinters and had nothing to do with data entry for the computer) tried to be helpful by showing her the tab key. Oh dear. A whole morning of utter tedium which had to be repeated.
I remember one of the scientists spending a morning typing in her data for input into a Fortran program, which required 6 spaces at the start of each line. Somewhere during the course of the morning, a clerk (who was there to use the flexiprinters and had nothing to do with data entry for the computer) tried to be helpful by showing her the tab key. Oh dear. A whole morning of utter tedium which had to be repeated.
Judi Durber
Member
A programmable 8-bit computer created using traditional embroidery techniqueshttps://heritagecrafts.org.uk/a-programmable-8-bit-computer-created-using-traditional-embroidery-techniques/?fbclid=IwAR3569aCRfAaQAMT0YJlp5ftivWVoLMWWRmHlak4Y9T4kL66DdGGSIRXTvI
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