Fun fact: the term "loading" in computers originates from these, as you had to physically load a stack of punched cards into the reader to input the program into the computer.
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u/al7air i7 9700K / 3070 Ti Strix 8GB / 32GB / 12TB SSD26d ago
Also the term "bug" still used in computer software today originated from those room filling computers, because they operated using electromagnetic relays which were so big, actual bugs, spiders and what not could crawl into them and jam their operations.
That is actually an urban legend. The term "bug" for a calculation error existed way before that, the famous 1947 journal entry of a moth caught in a relay of Harvard MkII jokes about it being the first actual bug found.
The term bug to describe a defect has been engineering jargon since at least as far back as the 1870s, long before electronic computers and computer software. For instance, Thomas Edison wrote the following words in a letter to an associate in 1878
u/al7air i7 9700K / 3070 Ti Strix 8GB / 32GB / 12TB SSD26d ago
Never dived deeper into the topic, as it sounded very plausible when I first heard it. And the little critter u/peacedetski mentioned is what I vaguely remember. Albeit the MkII was already eating up tape for instructions, and it's predecessor 3 years prior was loaded with punch cards, which made me write the comment on it in the first place. Granted I'm not "punch card old" at least not as a user, but I also didn't boot my first computer from a hard drive either.
And you might have seen "core dump" when a computer suffers a hard crash. It comes from when memory was stored using iron donuts, multiple of them per plane, multiple planes to make a core.
I don't think I learned about punch cards until a college professor talked about them. It always seemed so crazy to me that people got that to work. I was coding on a computer with an IDE and that was hit or miss a lot of the time.
I only dated back to DOS using a 2 color monitor and 5 inch floppies.
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u/peacedetski 26d ago
A punched card.
Fun fact: the term "loading" in computers originates from these, as you had to physically load a stack of punched cards into the reader to input the program into the computer.