[chbot] Choc fish challenege 4

[Charles Manning]

This takes me back to my uni days where I used pucnch cards for the whole of 
first year and part of second year.

Punch cards had their pros and cons.

Pros: 
1) Much harder to accidentally delete a file. 
2) No need for source control. Just keep the old cards that you swapped out in 
another box.
3) Made useful post cards.

Cons:
1) Big a box of cards (approx the size of a shoe box) held 2000 cards, each of 
which had 80 characters. ie. a max of 160k bytes.
2) A broken card reader could easily nick all the cards in a deck in a few 
seconds and you'd need to repunch them.
3) If you wanted to edit or indent a line you had to throw away a card and 
replace it. You went through lots of cards.
4) If you drop a box of cards it takes a while to sort out your program.

That last point I discovered when I tripped and  dropped a compiler (approx 
2500 cards)  down a stairwell.




On Friday 02 September 2011 11:29:27 HARTLEY, ROBIN (ROBIN) wrote:
> It was from the days of 7bit code and it's all 1's. So by knocking out all
> the chads you could turn any character into a Del.
>
> Regards,
> Robin
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: chchrobotics-bounces at lists.linuxnut.co.nz
> [mailto:chchrobotics-bounces at lists.linuxnut.co.nz] On Behalf Of Andre
> Renaud Sent: Friday, 2 September 2011 11:21 a.m.
> To: chchrobotics at lists.linuxnut.co.nz
> Subject: Re: [chbot] Choc fish challenege 4
>
> Isn't it to do with punch cards? The little bits of paper that were
> punched out were called 'chad'? Not sure how that becomes code 127 though.
>
> On 02/09/11 10:23, hamster wrote:
> > What has Chad got to do with the delete character being ASCII code 127?
>
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