A Call For Humor!

[RayDunzl]

Very early in my programming career, curious how much "nothing" I could perform in my fraction of a second of IBM 370 job time allotted to me as a beginner, I asked it to print as many periods as it could.

My fraction of a second of time concluded a few minutes after giving my little stack of punch cards to the attendant at the Input Window.

Next came a very loud and very rapid BAM!! BAM!! BAM!! BAM!! BAM!! (for several minutes) from the line printer as 80(?) hammers simultaneously hit 80 periods at 1,100 lines per minute on the rotating letter drum for something over a half million characters.

Nobody seemed to be able figure out how to stop it.

The attendant at the Output Window advised me not to do that again.

 

[Berwhale]

Nothing I hope. The person who wrote and/or approved the instructions on the other hand...what possessed them to think #2 was a sensible thing to give to a security guard, let alone #4?! I hope the last part of the restore included writing a small script to be run by the new user for the security guard.

Ahem, well the Platinum card service desk also used an RS/6000 to access the Sabre flight booking system to book flights on Concord (and other less interesting planes) for card holders . The RS/6000 was located in the smoking room on the same floor as the desk (it was *very* nicotine stained and 4 floors away from the 'data hall'). The whole desk (~40 people) logged on to the RS/6000 as root

 

[jkasch]

The chemical smell of the page the teacher is passing out that is fresh off the drum copier.

While I never passed out running one of those, some of my students liked to sniff the copies and brag about being able to read the ones that didn’t turn out well.

 

[theREALdotnet]

One night, when I happened to be on-call, a security guard managed to bungle #3 and ended up running rm *.* in the root of the file system. This fatally wounded the RS/6000 and broke the doors in all 17 offices in the UK. This included the EMEA headquarters which had around 4,000 people working there (including me) and many doors!

This is probably what prompted IBM to add the "shake to undo" feature to the RS/6000...

 

[theREALdotnet]

Not a printer failure, but I once had a core dump delivered on a hand truck. On the whole, I prefer blue screens.

Haha, reminds me of VAX TREK (if anyone remembers that).

The Super-User crashed to the ground in the midst of a core dump as
the entire landing party opened multiple input channels from their PHA0:s.
Kirk walked over to the remains of the entity. "A core dump is
always an ugly sight!"

 

[Peterinvan]

In freshman year I spent a few hours on the punch card machine coding the lines for my FORTRAN program.
Dropped the whole stack on the floor on the way to submit it for compilation

 

[thewas]

 

[Petrushka]

In freshman year I spent a few hours on the punch card machine coding the lines for my FORTRAN program.
Dropped the whole stack on the floor on the way to submit it for compilation

I did a bit of punch card coding one summer. Can’t that be fixed by a sorter? Or do you first have to dup the cards?

 

[theREALdotnet]

In freshman year I spent a few hours on the punch card machine coding the lines for my FORTRAN program.
Dropped the whole stack on the floor on the way to submit it for compilation

That seems to have been a common problem, those punch cards are very slick

We had the additional issue that only two of the ten or so punch card machines available to students could print the line of code onto the the top of the card...

 

[Robin L]

 

[JSmith]

JSmith

 

[Buckaroo Shanzai]

It needs aws to do what exactly, download water from the cloud?

 

[respice finem]

Obviously, to have a subscription for water

 

[Berwhale]

It needs aws to do what exactly, download water from the cloud?
View attachment 484950

Anyone who has studied the hydrological cycle knows that water comes from clouds

 

[Gary_G]

Tractor feed

Bernoulli Drive​

 

[Buckaroo Shanzai]

I thought Mars was closest?

 

[Buckaroo Shanzai]

 

[Buckaroo Shanzai]

 

[hex168]

That seems to have been a common problem, those punch cards are very slick

We had the additional issue that only two of the ten or so punch card machines available to students could print the line of code onto the the top of the card...

The trick was to take a Sharpie and draw a diagonal line on the side of the deck. Then it could be reassembled in order.

 

[BeeKay]

KIA includes a petrol air freshener with its new EV to make it easier for petrolheads to switch