IBM Punch Cards and ASCII Code

I am going to sing a few lines.



Daisy, Daisy,
Give me your answer do!
I'm half crazy,
All for the love of you!
It won't be a stylish marriage,
I can't afford a carriage
But you'll look sweet upon the seat
Of a bicycle made for two.


It’s a song called Daisy. It would take a long time to get back.

I picked this book up, “In the beginning”, what they did is that I think what happened is that original software programmers in the 60s they would be going to conferences and they would present a paper and this guy did it too and he got this idea that before these guys died off they would submit their recollection into book form and they did and ther’es about 10 of them here and they talk about how it was like programming in the 50s and 60s.

YOU want an example?

Aite..so I don’t remember the company but if you wanted to write a program you wrote it all in pencil and after thaty you went over to this big machine was like a typewriter and you took the punchcards and they were called IBM cards and I guess they were automated and the card would feed in and you would type in the code of that line and if you were gonna say – if x equal to four and it would say x=4 on the top and then it would punch out the holes in the cards – physical holes.

Dhruv says “I have seen those”

The A means America but the original ascii code didn’t have things like that but its like this – they decided that they needed to have a common number and every computer system the letter A would always be written as a number and they had to decide what number was gonna be for all computer systems and computer systems of a computer is binary = either 0 or 1. that’s the two states. If you wanna think about it, think of it as light bulbs and try to communicate with light buls and if you can communicate to people with it right?

Go along with that idea and if you need two pieces of information – if the dad’s awake or not so you look at all the possible combos. 2^4 and all light bulbs. A lot of STUFF about LIGHT BULBS!!

What about period and exclamation marks? That gives us a 128 possibilities and is that enough? 7 is not a enough number. They decided 8 is not enough bits so they went to 16 bits.

8 bits = 1 byte.

Eventually they decided that for universal code – ascii – they went to ‘double byte code’ – 256*256.

Colors on the screen – the original screen just had a black screen (640*480) They went from black to four colors. 2 bits would be a sign of 2 pixels and this somehow gives you a choice of black, white and two grays. Then they went to 8 colors and required. Each pixel needed a byte.

You couldn’t show a photograph in 8 bits and for the photographs you needed 2 bytes – 16 bits. And then you just do 2^16 = 64,000 colors. But now computers can show movies and this means that any single photgraph could show with 64000 colors but if you wanted to show a series of pics but it turned out that 64000 wasn’t enough to show a movie. So they added another byte.

Double byte.
So here was the question – we got to the point that we had 16 million colors. Technology made it possible to go to 4 bytes = 32 bits and these were 32 bits processors right so it was inconvinent to send 3 bytes but push to go to 4 bytes of color.

But human eye can’t see 16 million colors! They struggled with the question

The computer operator and he would take your stack of cards and put it in this big holder thing and he would drop in there and your cards would be at the bottom and they would be sucked into the machine each card at one time.

So what would happen is that in the old days you only got to run your program once and at the end of the day you would bring your thing to the guys and you did one run and in the morning you would the print out and if ur printout says that ‘u forgot a semi colon on the second line’ so instead you did the checking in your hand and not the computer. If you made a stupid mistake, you lost the whole day!!

Computers and editing in the movie process and movies used to be edited just with tape and the guys who edited it they would think to themselves and one fading in and one fading out but did he have that to show people? No! but later on he would create that crossfade and as he was working his way trhough different edits it would take like a year to edit a major film and they could think about it for months and it’s just not working and all those transitions can be showin immediately so when you edit stuff now – they give you less months now cuz its much easier so now editing decisions are made quickly and they don’t go back and do it again. Its completely changed the way movie gets finished. All the first decisions are last decisions now. They do the editing, shoot simultaneously and then later make the film copy the video and now they have gone digital and the movie is already finished. That’s the equivalent in real world compared to software.