Punching In

My only computer science class in college was Keypunch, and I failed it. It's not that I didn't do the work: in fact, I finished the entire semester's homework in the first two weeks of class. I was working part-time at night and on the weekends as a remote terminal operator and JCL programmer for the Texas Education Agency's Region XVIII Education Service Center in Midland. I had an auto-verifying IBM 129 keypunch machine there and a lot of time on my hands while batch jobs were running in the IBM 370 at the other end.

Of course, once I'd done the entire semester's work, other than turning the cards back in, I had no interest in attending class because who the heck wants to sit in a class when all the work is already finished? I mean, it's not as though there were any lectures beyond the first week. How many ways can you say, "the machine punches little rectangular holes in card stock?" I sort of forgot to show up for the final exam, whatever that was supposed to be, so I failed. Meh. I did get certified as an IBM 029/129 Keypunch Operator, though. That ranks as probably the least useful certification of my career, just below the Certified Novell Engineer 4 that I achieved shortly before I ceased to work on Novell networks forever.

That remote terminal operator job had some great aspects to it. Back in those days printers took up half the room and sounded like some kind of industrial assembly line in operation. Paper came in continuous sheets with perforations every eleven inches, fed from boxes. We had single, double, and triple copy paper, the copies being provided by a layer of carbon paper between sheets. Once a month I had to spend most of my shift printing out a 3,000 page report on triple copy paper. It was an epic waste.

Paper with multiple copies had to be bursted and decollated. The burster separated out the carbon paper, then the decollater split up the copies into individual stacks. One morning I happened to be working late on some project and I saw the TEA accountant come in to examine the report. He looked at maybe three numbers separated by 500 pages or so each, then threw all three copies away. Nine thousand pages of paper for three numbers. It's a wonder we have any trees left at all.

Ironically, or perhaps not so much, less than 40 miles from that building is a tiny West Texas town called "Notrees."