Punch Cards

While I was working at the Navy research lab, I decided to take a class in the programming language Fortran, which was being offered by my employer. After the first couple of sessions of class, we were given an assignment to write a simple program to calculate our average gas mileage. For the next class session, we were instructed to bring a stack of punch cards with the program punched into it.

At the lab where I was working, I saw a bank of keypunch machines that were available "on demand." So I went there and diligently punched my program into a machine, and picked up my punch cards.

At the next session of class, our instructor took us to a room that contained a card reader, a large, complex machine that would read our punch cards and transmit the information to a mainframe computer somewhere. However, when my deck of cards went into the machine, they simply disappeared. They didn't come back out, and the machine gave no sign of having read them.

The instructor finally figured out that the keypunch machine I used was a slightly different variety than the kind needed for this card reader. I would have to punch a new set of cards on a different machine that was in the corporate building. This annoyed me greatly, because I would have to make a special trip across town from the lab where I worked to the corporate building.

However, before I managed to do that, my mother died. I was so grief-stricken, I didn't have the heart to go through with that class, and so I never learned to program in Fortran, although I was able to read it when I was writing a document for a Fortran program.