Old Computer Technology vs Today

Today's cell phones have more computing power than the old mainframes of the '50s-'70s. They pack more punch than the computer used to land Apollo 11, where astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to walk on the Moon. Yet their size and cost continue to shrink.

As odd as it might seem today, commercial computers “back in the day” (1950s - early 1970s) did not have keyboards or screens (except for the operators) because users didn’t have direct access to the computers. These were mainframes, which took up entire rooms. This situation persisted until at least the mid 1960s, when terminals started to appear.

You would typically write your program out on a coding sheet, and turn it into the keypunch department where a number of operators — usually women — would use a keypunch to punch a card for each line of your program, whether it be FORTRAN, COBOL, etc. — the languages common back then. It was unusual for a programmer to keypunch their own program, but there might be one keypunch outside the computer room where a person could punch a few cards to correct mistakes in their program, before resubmitting.

Typically the jobs, if fairly large, were submitted in a box. Each box could hold up to 2000 80-column cards, like this one:

The program decks would then be read into a card reader attached to the computer, and executed as “batch jobs”, run one after another. Each program was preceded by a few cards with JCL (Job Control Language) which specified what resources the program needed (such as tape drives) and invoked the necessary compilers and linkers. The cards for your source program would be followed by any cards containing pre-built libraries needed by your program (in binary format), followed by additional cards (if any) with the data needed by your program.

When the program was finished running, perhaps minutes, hours, or even a day after you submitted it, both the original deck and your printout would be available in on a shelf in an output area. Less often, your program might punch cards as additional output.

Card decks for different jobs could be stacked in a reader by the operator, since each one had its own JCL header. On most large systems, the cards would not be read by the computer directly, as that would be too slow but instead would be read by a separate device and their image written to a tape drive.

When minicomputers appeared in the 1960s, paper tape was often used instead of punch cards for smaller installations.

By the 1970s, computer terminal access to mainframes became more widespread, and punch card usage dwindled off. Then personal computers appeared, with their individual keyboards and screens in the mid to late 1970s.

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