And watch some of the greatest space programs Like SpaceX that will take us to a new level of exploration with some wonderful ladys and gentlemen of todays workforce. WOW
People like to say things like your wristwatch has more computing power than x. But generally that’s only true in a very limited sense. Sure your ipad is faster and had more ram than some of the mainframes from the 60s/70s, but does it have 50,000 dedicated i/o channels that can all be responded to in real time?
@@stargazer7644 - Not sure what the hell you're smoking, but today's supercomputers have over 1,000,000,000x (1 billion) times more computing power than supercomputers from the 1960's... and there weren't that many computers in the world back then. Today's regular computers definitely have more computing power than those supercomputers... it's not even close. More than the entire world might be debatable though.
@@Kevin-bt4wb What am I smoking? What are you smoking? Who said anything about supercomputers? These weren't supercomputers, they were standard business machines. Your ipad also isn't a supercomputer. And once again, I'd like to see you hook 50,000 serial terminals up to your ipad. Ram and CPU speed aren't the only measures of a computer's power. These old mainframes had ENORMOUS amounts of I/O. I know because I ran one back in the day with >50,000 lines on it.
@@stargazer7644 - The CDC 6600, which is generally considered the worlds first supercomputer, came out in 1964, 3 years after this movie's timeframe (1961). The computer she uses in the movie is an IBM 7090. Don't be lazy, look up the *COMPUTING POWER* of the CDC 6600 compared to todays computers. There's dozens of links on the internet. Everything I said was accurate and an understatement, because I used the world's first supercomputer (CDC 6600) instead of the much slower (30x slower) IBM 7090 used in the movie. There's actually tables all over the internet that show COMPUTING POWER and have today's computers and the IBM 7090 listed in the same table. Once again, don't be lazy. Do actual research and learn what the definition of *COMPUTING POWER* is for starters.
My Computer Lab teacher at school was married to a lecturer at a local university. They still had a old punch card reader and mainframe in the Computer lab. She taught us the basics of entering data using punch cards and had us all set up a very basic formula. Then he took them to work and ran them after hours, bringing us a printout of the results. It was out first practical test. I passed. Mine are framed and hang in my study. 32 years later, I'm a Senior Integration Engineer, but I still look at it and smile.
At school in New Zealand around 1974 the maths teacher had us fill out punch cards for a problem and a friend of his ran them on the University of Waikato IBM machine after hours, about a week later he came into class and gave us all a stack of paper about 2 inches high. Mine was great for a page and a half then about 50 pages of error messages.
1979, I started programming using PL/I written on coding pads and entered using punch cards. The 10MB hard drives were 2 feet across and had several platters. Printing was back to punched cards, punched tape or onto a hugely noisy line-printer that spat out 17" green-lined paper at a prodigious rate. Our water-cooled mainframe had a massive 16MB of core memory and, just about, multitasked. *Proper* computing, that was.
My mother was presented the opportunity to learn how to set type with a punchcard IBM in the early seventies at the Park Trail Gazette. That computer made her a technical publications editor for the Army. She simply read the manual. Ladies are good about that. If there is anything I learned in life, it’s that you can improve and do anything if you know how to read well and you can get that information for free from the public library system.
Its crazy how that's true even today. I practice electrical engineering and believe me I always find critical mistakes left out in customer products because someone missed the errata or forgot that section in the datasheet for the chip IC being used. My first goto to anyone facing issues nowadays is "Have you read the datasheet?"
That is an amazing story. In Grades 5 and 6 My teacher Mr Walker made us read one books per week. He didn’t care what is was but we had to read and do a book report on it. At first I struggled but got I to reading The Three Investigators and the Hardy Boys I ended up being a fast, plus 1000 wpm, with strong retention. It helped me thru high school, college, University and life
My girlfriend was talking about how her brother and his wife work well together because she's calm and can read the manual on things and he has a hot head and gets frustrated so what they do is she just tells him the steps and he does them. My GF also has a hot-head and hasn't realized I'm the read-the-manual type yet, even though I'm a dude. She will.
Unfortunately this scene is completely unrealistic. Both her and the guys wouldn’t have acted like that. This movie wanted to be an agenda movie and screwed up its opportunity to honestly celebrate the woman in the space program.
@@RogerWilco1 It is necessary! It shows that Dorothy Vaughan was at the start of the computer program and became a leader in computer programing for NASA. The behavior is accurate for the times. But how would I know? Decades later when men should have finally matured, I was denied employment as a scientist because I am a woman. That agency lost the contract because there wasn't a biologist on staff. It still happens.
In reality the "gentlemen" who came from IBM be like: "Is that supposed to impress us? Our company literally wrote the book on this machine and ways to program it after designing and building it - congratulations wench you can read and follow instructions, you're clearly a genius......." 😒 FORTRAN was actually invented by engineers at IBM - the same company that made and installed that computer at NASA in the first place. This makes this entire "oh wow" plot even more ridiculous, because it obscures the basic knowledge of the IBM engineers that installed the computer, not to mention the vastly more talented computer scientist/engineer (and woman!) Lois Haibt who worked on the FORTRAN development team at IBM in 1957 - 4 years before the main events of the movie start! Trust Hollywood to praise a mere technician for something accomplished years before them by more talent individuals. It's the equivalent of praising the first doctors to inject a patient with commercially produced penicilin, rather than the scientists who discovered and isolated it for use.
My goodness the two men in the comment section are just getting their painted in a twist typing essays on how these women didn’t do anything yall there’s a reason these ladies had a movie after them and not the people you mentioned.lawrdt
That's why we ALWAYS put sequence numbers on our punch cards. Anyone that punched their card decks and did NOT use sequence numbers was just asking to have them get dropped at some point, Not everyone always handled the cards decks so carefully.
I learned BASIC using Hollerith cards. It seemed like magic back then. When I finally got a computer with a 20mb hard drive I thought "I'll NEVER fill this up!"
When I was on B-1 flight test in the mid 80s we still had 2 B-1A models from the 1970s flying. One test for the flight controls was loaded into the system from a punch card reader. When the engineer brought out the stack of punch cards he said if ANYONE made him drop or mix up the cards they would be killed, period.
Going from there to floppy disks wasn't as different. Getting a bunch of floppies out of order would be hell. The difference would be, the floppy disks wouldn't be as vulnerable to a gust of wind.
Had a punch card machine in college, with a little toggle switch near the top. Flip the switch, and the machine would print out a sequence number on the card in addition to the instruction on the card. Or you could always hold a batch of cards together and draw a diagonal line across the tops with a marker. Dropping your cards was inevitable. Dropping them a second time without a fail safe was YOUR fault.
In college, you took your punch card stack to the computer building, gave them to the lady, and you went back the next day to find out if they ran correctly. . . . Old punch cards, with the holes, you took home, stapled them into cones, stapled the cones together like a chrysanthenum flower wreath, and sprayed it gold, as a Christmas door hanging decoration. Or you wrote food recipes on them.
Where I went to college, we took our cards to the RJE card reader. Toward finals week, turnaround time could be 30 hours…. All thanks to the business majors…we’ll, maybe all, but primarily…
And once you'd figured out how the "control cards" worked (the ones that restricted the amount of time and memory students were allowed to use it was a simple matter to override those.
At school in 1978 our cards were posted to a university in the nearest city and you waited until you got run or failed to run back in time for the following week's session.
We had an Amdahl 360 as our mainframe computer back in the mid-70s at University of Cincinnasty, with weird monochrome amber monitors that couldn't show moving images and were 'erased' with a flash button. The Singer card reader could read at least two cards per second, and much of the monitor's internal phosphor coating was flaking off. Stone Age stuff now, as is the Fortran 4 I learned to "program" in. Glad it's gone!
I know she wouldnt be able to say it without repercussion. But i like "Hey you cant be in here that is a very delicate piece of equipment" and shes like "Explains how you were able to break it"
It wasn't broken. They just didn't know how to use it. If you were around in those very early days of computing, you'd know that wasn't an uncommon occurrence, lol.
I guess I am among the last programmers to ever punch a physical card for my job. In 1989, I was the most junior programmer/analyst at Miami University. So, I got called in at night for system support. We had a number of small jobs that were only run once or twice a year, and had been running without change for twenty years or more. So, the source code for these jobs had never been converted from card deck to tape. The card reader physically mangled one of the cards in the source deck, so I came in, in the middle of the night and repunched the one destroyed card. So my career contains the smallest possible link to the card era. One card.
Very few can appreciate that story like I can. I was on the punch cards back at Northern Illinois University from 1980-1984. That era was right at the end of punch cards. We got terminals when I was a senior. For whatever reason, I have never admitted to anyone that I was working on punch cards (I think from a Burrough's) puncher, back in my youth. But after your punch, the era was over huh. They gotta make a movie called "The Final Punch"
@@dxwallace55 I took a single FORTRAN class in 1985 that was on cards, everything else was on terminals. So, I had at least used an 029 card punch before. But I only punched a single card as an actual employee.
@@robynharris7179 LOL!! I remember Fortran. I had one class in 1982.I was the "King of COBOL" however. Strange enough, there are now a shortage of Cobol programmers because so few know it an it is still used quite a bit like in Insurance companies like Blue Cross, who run mainframes (a.k.a., "Heavy Metal") to process volumes of data. I guess what goes around comes around. I've been into IBM Cognos Business Intelligence for the past 20 years and Tableau for the past 4 years, and I don't even put the older years on my resume!!! Would like be a musician telling the band leader about your 8-track players LOL!!! The scene in front of the IBM with the tape reels brings back memories though.
@@dxwallace55 I had never used FORTRAN in my career. I finally decided to throw all my books away in 2011. Two months later I got an engagement converting an enormous FORTRAN based system written in 1959 to C#. The documentation was going to cost almost $4,000 to replace. So, my boss told me to just figure it out on my own. Never fails. You never need it till you don’t have it.
I LOVE this movie! I get emotional when I watch Dorothy walk her team across the campus and into the computer room. Great acting by all and I am a big fan of the real life first ladies of computing.
That's sad.. and no it isn't. The racism/bigotry in this movie is fictional, total lies. The real story UNITES and doesn't tear down white people and men.. disgusting
In the 70s I did overnight runs using card decks 18” long. Got the printout back next morning (2” thick), spotted the errors, re-punched a card or two, and re-submitted the card deck....After a few weeks the purpose had become getting the thing to work ... quite forgot the technical question that was the point of it all.
I still have a long spool of paper tape stored in an old 35mm film canister. It's in 7-bit ebdic. I'm 70 and still have network certifications - we've definitely come a long way.
My father as a young executive of a bank in Brockton Massachusetts was tasked with settng up the computer system at the bank in the late 60's/early 70's. He knew little about them but was a fast learner. In the late 70's before he passed away. I remember he owned a calculator but never used it. Did all the calculations in his head. He taught me how to use a slide rule. Today people could not survive without computers.
I taught a entry level algebra class, the students all in high school, could not do basic arithmetic. So I took all the calculators, locked them up and told the class they have all achieved incredible notoriety, they all failed. Until they passed a basic arithmetic test they were failures and their final grade for the year would reflect that. I used a slide rule too, but I did teach them the lessons in arithmetic they should have learned in grade school, no algebra for them! Lots of angry parents but the administration showed them the dismal failures on paper. They were silent. Every student passed basic arithmetic.
Do Not Fold, Spindle , or Mutilate... IBM 360 was my first. Loading the 'Boot' deck before class started was my job. Until one day when it wouldn't and they had to a tech $25.00/hr plus mileage to drive up from Dallas to work two weeks to finally figure out the timing was off from the card feeder and the card reader. Just a simple screwdriver adjustment in the end.
Having pre-Mainframe IBM myself, this computer had less compute power than your Apple Watch, and yet, it was the IBM Computer of the Day.... amazing... I still liked Taraji's character much better than an old pre-mainframe computer running a hamstrung DOS OS (not the DOS of PC days) .... in the end though, she saved the day....
My mother worked as a keypunch operator (typer of the holes in the cards seen here) at the phone company. The computer was a three story building, plus basement. The keypunch operators were on the second floor, the reel-to-reel magnetic tape type memory, as seen in this clip, were on the third, the computer specialists/maintainers, admin, and management offices were on the first, and the computer was in the basement where it was easier to keep cool. Four floors dedicated to one computer; A computer that was really just a huge database. The cards were then fed into a reader that transferred their data to the reel-to-reel magnetic tape memory upstairs. Those reels of memory would then be loaded and run through the actual computer that placed the data in customer records on other magnetic memory tapes. That's all that four floors of computer actually did: Match up and update customer records.
How big was this operation before the computer took over its processing? And the error rate between human and computer processing? Yeah, 4 stories is big but probably worth it over the long term as it was faster and had less errors.
I used a HP computer system in 1982 that had a disc/hard drive the size of a small refrigerator with 2.2 MB of memory. Visitors were AMAZED! It ran an automated accelerometer calibration (shaker) system for the USN. Fun times.
Back in the 80s... worked on the Univac 9000 series at Naval Station Roosevelt Roads in Puerto Rico. To think that my phone has way more computing power and memory than those rooms full of equipment back in the day.
I remember those machines; worked at the phone company for awhile. We sent out those crazy punch cards for commercial phone bills; sometimes boxes of them, if the account was large enough. Lily Tomlin even had a standup routine about getting back at the phone company using the cards. 🤭
I took both BASIC and FORTRAN in college in 1971 and remember being at the computer center in the evening typing my programs' punch cards. 80 characters per card and don't ever get them out of order. The punches (perhaps the original hanging chads) were gathered and made for great confetti fights.
I learned COBOL and FORTRAN programming using punch cards punched from an IBM 029 and 129. Later, I built a Heathkit H9 CRT terminal and connected it to the Honeywell 6023 mainframe with a modem and did my programming, compiling, and debugging online from home while the other students had to sweat it out on the limited amount of keypunch machines in the computer lab and submit their decks of cards and wait for their results to come back from the computer operator. Learning to program in a batch processing environment separated the men from the boys.
That's why the last few columns were reserved for a sequence number. That way you could run the cards through a sorter and get them back into proper order.
My first "computer" was a Sinclair 1000. The program was loaded using cassette tape and it had 16KB of internal Ram and a 16KB RAM pack for a total of 32KB, that at the time was considered HUGE memory. LOL
I remember taking a Fortran IV class after work ~1977, and using those cards. A few years later at a new job, I needed to do some Fortran and asked 'where is the Key punch?' Just use the 3270 terminal in the alcove. How fast things changed. A 500MB disk was bigger than a dish washer and I just put a 1T SSD into my laptop. And Who needs more than 640K of RAM :/
I remember those punch cards oh so well. The joy of getting back the cards from the punch bureau , checking them, putting the stack of several hundred cards on your desk and having some numpty knock them over and having to sort them manually into the right order. Oh what fun ! Computers with less memory than one of those talking birthday cards.
@foot bru Oh, yes, I remember fanfold computer paper! I also remember 3 part report paper and having to split it manually because the bank was too cheap to pay for an automated splitter. I had to be there so I might as well do something useful! And you tell the young ones of the fun and games and they don't think it is possible. Did you ever read of the bastard operator from hell? And dream of doing some of those things?
That's why the last few columns were reserved for a sequence number. That way you could run the cards through a sorter and get them back into proper order.
I spent many hours sitting at a keypunch machine during my time in the Air Force in the 70s. I have no idea just how many boxes of those IBM cards I went through!
USAF 1990.. trained punch cards, magnetic reel to reel, paper tape reader, comm centers. There must be more to this scene, because grabbing half a very small deck of punch cards and running it through like that isn't going to fix anything.
I remember taking my cards to the engineering department. Someone would call our lab to let us know our printouts were ready. Chemistry at its best in the 60's and 70's.
Our college computer had the newest laser printer. The big joke was a program you could run, where it would count to a million, putting one number on every sheet of printout. Then we would sneak that stack of cards in, and wait for them to be read. The printer would immediately spool off the entire roll of paper, up into the air and all over the room.
@@christinemeleg4535 I entered the University of British Columbia in 1979 pursuing a Chemical Engineering degree. The first-year engineering classes were required to take a Computer Science course that used FORTRAN in which the data was entered using punch cards. I think we were the last class that used them.
1969, I was programming an IBM 1620, that had a MASSIVE 20 Megabyte Hard drive (12" platters), 1622 Reader/Punch and used a Selectric typewriter for the operator I/O (about 10 characters per second). Primary output was to a line printer, but I forget the model number for it.
@@user-eh2ul3bx3y The line printer available for the IBM 1620 was the IBM 1443. Type bars are vertical bars, one for each print position in a line. Each bar is one character wide with the printer's entire character set: either alphabetic characters, including numerals and symbols, or just numerals and symbols, molded into the front surface in a single column. In printing, each bar is raised up until the correct character for that print position was opposite the paper, whereupon the bar is pushed toward the paper, so that the correct numeral or letter pressed against the ribbon, striking the paper much the way type slugs leave an impression on paper in a standard typewriter. Each bar had to be brought up into the correct position and then drop back down in preparation to print the next line.
@@RaymondHng Now that jogged my memory, the printer was not a bar type, but a band printer. The card reader/punch was a 1622 - standard 80 column Hollerith. The selectric typewriter, was the operator's I/O, and not the line printer.
@@DontDrinkthatstuffyou do know that the internet exists, right? If it were fiction, why did NASA name a building after one of the ladies? I suggest you open a history book. 🤡
well she had no choice; that mechanical computer was in a bit of time about to put the human computers out of work, and she realized it. so she taught herself how to program it and then taught her team how, do they had a future right alongside the machine.
Ah! I remember the time. My first machine was a 1620, then an 1130 (years later I was offered it if I would just take it away... progress) and finally an RCA Spectra 70, a 370 lookalike. Then I put together an IMSAI at home and had my *own* machine. 2 MHz, 64k of memory and two, count 'em, two 1 MByte 8" floppies. A real word processor and you could play Space Invaders. Ooh.
"1130 (years later I was offered it if I would just take it away... " --- That never happened. IBM never sold the 1130 to anyone in the US, they leased the 1130 to customers, And when IBM was through leasing that machine to a customer IBM would carefully remove it from the customer's location and transport it to a car crusher or metal shredder to thoroughly turn the 1130 into scrap so that could never be used again, no parts were left that could be used for spare parts. (In Europe a very small number of systems, just a handful were sold, not leased to government agencies).
Sometimes it just takes a fresh perspective/eyes to see the solution... Dorothy can fix... A N Y T H I N G !!!!!! Now... wish she was around to fix my computer!! :-)
She was too kind. And a Southerner, so she knew what to do - she just didn't do it. But I would have. Wait a few seconds for them to realize that things were working, and then look over her shoulder and say "You're welcome."
Not a polite way to use "you're welcome." It's insincere and intended to shame. If you want colleagues to think of you as bright and conscientious, best to avoid mean-spirited zingers.
@@hd-xc2lz You are correct of course. It just ticks me off to see them ignore her simply because she was a black woman. Matching their attitude though, makes you their equal. My bad.
@@julieenslow5915 Yes, but it's a fictional scenario created to instill a feeling of outrage in the audience, conceived by a pair of white screenwriters (not in the original book). I don't doubt for a second that these African American women were treated awfully, but I just can't get angry over such manipulative filmmaking.
@@hd-xc2lz oh! You are one of THOSE!! LOL!! I look at it as a window into a real event. You look at like a play on a stage. They could be one and the same but I just have a huge imagination and so I play it a little too real for many people. But I am an artist and I need that imagination so I don't apologize for it. Ever.
@@julieenslow5915 I'm an artist as well, but please tell me about the "THOSE" to whom I belong. Not a rhetorical request, I'm interested to hear. To me the film felt too much like cheesy old Soviet Socialist Realism, more about ethical instruction than creating three dimensional characters, a world populated only by saints and sinners. I prefer my worlds gray and my characters flawed.
In the early 80's i had to read the processor's manual of one of my first ccomputers then i wrote an assembler-disassembler program during Xmas holidays. All was stored on ma radio-tape recorder. I was 15yo, it was a very good time !
Ah the joys of punched cards. Back in the very early 70s as a post grad I used the university ICL1906S - all FORTRAN prog on cards. I would submit a job early morning and collect the output the next afternoon (if I was lucky). I would take the shoe box(es) of cards go to my student flat and find the errors. Come Christmas, I gave up and went home for food etc. When I came back I found out I have left the cards in my car. The damp had warped all the cards (500+). Almost suicidal, but saved by sandwiching them between two metal plates and putting in a vacuum chamber for a couple of days.
When I registered for classes in college in 1971, we collected a punch card for each class and turned them in to register. I still have a blank IBM punch card from when I mucked about in the Academic Computing area. Talk about a piece of retro history.
Some companies sent bills with a part of a punch card. They had adapters that would allow the card readers to handle the shorter cards. The customer was supposed to return the card with the payment. Customers were instructed "Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate."
@@jamesfunk7614 The phone company would send a bill to the customer with a punch card that was suppose to be mailed back with a check for payment. My high school COBOL teacher told us he once punched a few extra holes in the card and mailed it back along with a check. He got a stern letter from the phone company later telling him not to do that again.
Do not take movies to serious. Dorothy WAS a (real) great person with great skills but this is not how people at NASA and such worked together. And i am 100% sure the real Dorothy would be upset to see that 2 guys there portrait as some stupids. You are not there if you are like that and even when you do not like a person you usually respect their skills. I worked on company level in some related field and thats pretty much hollywoods idea about people they did not really know and understood - and which they do not like usually.
I'm so grateful for people like her they were the pioneers of modern day computing if it wasn't for them I would not be computers and programs today. First computer language I had to learn was FORTRAN and Unix.
yes, Dorothy changes a pin or two in an electrical panel that gets the machine to operate .. _around __0:50__ in the following clip_ > vimeo.com/213129047
@@Cacille Still doesn't "fix it". She knows what dip switches (or whatever) to set for the machine to operate properly. You may not be familiar with 8088 machines but you had to set how much on-board memory you had for it to work properly. If the memory was set incorrectly the machine would not see all its memory-it wasn't broke and did not need "fixing" it just needed to be configured correctly. If she replaced a burned-out resistor or bad capacitor then she would have fixed the machine-what she did, no.
In Houston, Tx 1966 I found the IBM 1620 on the Rice University campus. About 8 weeks later I had a part-time job programming the IBM 360/50 with punched cards in PL/1 and Assembler.
My dearly departed Dad helped design and create one of the first 'punch card' computerised banking systems in the early seventies for ANZ Bank in London!. I still have a rejected IBM chip encased in plastic as a key ring he got from IBM on a business trip to them to look at the kit they were offering. I also have memories of going to work with Dad on weekends watching the cards being loaded ready for test runs prior to rollout. I might add, the teams individual 'desktops or work stations' which they wrote/designed the code on only had 32kb of ram, 16 of which was needed to make the things run!.......
I remember doing a small punchcard query for senior year math class. I remember Wang and IBM displaywriter stand-alone word processing machines. Ah, those were the days.
35 years ago I was a mobile IT bod looking after Unix based accounting systems for various clients the company had, was sent to Guinness at Hanger Lane got sent to the end of the site to a building and when I walked in was greeted buy the office manager and saw a IBM punch card computer and a bank of reel to reels, I wish they had digital cameras back then, it looked amazing.
You are wrong!! This entire movie was based on a true story that was made for the cinema with embellishments to make it more interesting! These Black women existed and were very intelligent even more so than the men!!
Back in 70s friends buddy used ISU computer and computer designed a 4 link set up for a Camaro, they then cut floor and tink up, moved it all inboard and built a 4 link on stock Camaro underpinnings. Reason was this was before NHRA rules changed and allowed 2x3 mild wall rear team rails to be swapped in.
Since you had to wait until the next day most times to get your report, I would submit multiple decks for the same program. Hopefully, at least one of them might work correctly. Our university used an IBM 360 mainframe.
I worked on a lot of mainframes, but the first had 20K (yes, K) of memory, 5 tape drives, no disks, a card reader/punch and a printer. We ran an insurance company with it.
She put in the cards that ran the bootloader software that started it up. The "big brain boys" didn't know they had to do that. Back in those days, bootloaders were not integrated, every time you started it up, you had to tell the computer HOW to compute first, THEN start running programming on it.
My mom, an engineering aid at Boeing's Plant 2 wind tunnel facility, went through their training program for Fortran because engineers can't be bothered with such things. I got into computers in the late seventies when I bought an Apple 2 and taught myself programming, but somehow we never talked about dealing with computers. Weird. Anyway, an old timer I hung out with told me the trick with those punch cards used to feed information into a computer was to take a felt tip pen and draw a diagonal line on the side of the stack of cards, so if they get dropped or some such it was a lot faster to get them back into order.
That's one shortcut. But That's why the last few columns were reserved for a sequence number. That way you could run the cards through a sorter and get them back into proper order.
My dad was an plant scientist and in the 60s used to bring home a statistical analyzer that ran on punch cards to process overnight. It was about three times the size of a manual typewriter but much heavier. I think he must have kept all the cards after the data was ingested, because until he died recently he used those cards for notes to his family and himself.
I remember punch cards in college. Pisses me off because in a matter of 1 or 2 years personal computers, networked pcs, databases, programming languages, plus sun workstations and Digital VAX systems all replaced this big IBM systems. I felt sorry for those kids who learned punch cards on mainframes, graduated, and found in a few short years their punch card knowledge was obsolete...they either learn the new technology themselves or go back to school and learn it. I was angry because by the time I graduated colleges were offering programming and databases which really pissed me off because I needed that knowledge badly after I graduated.
@@Martyupnorth, Dorothy Vaughn taught herself and her staff FORTRAN in the 60s when it was relatively new. As the movie shows she did this on her own, when women weren’t allowed into the computer rooms. Your ability to learn it once it was virtually obsolete, when great resources were available, when (I’m guessing) it wasn’t your first computer language, pales as an accomplishment next to Mrs. Vaughn’s.
A simplistic, revisionist version of events...who knows what the next 'remake' of these events will be portrayed as...'her' role will be played by a Mexican 'man' as they are underrepresented in science history...😳
I went to college in the fall of 1978. Summer of '78 was the last quarter you were required to card punch your computer programs. I learned how to use a card punch to turn punch cards into decorative items. Like spelling my name in punch holes. You held it up and it spelled BILLL.
I dropped out of high school and attended a computer college in Chicago I worked at Stewart-Warner corp during the day and went to school at night learned Cobal---BAL--and RPG programing on the old IBM 360/20 COS system and after a year moved on to the 360/30 TOS/DOS/COS never got a high school diploma or a GED but went on to be a systems analyst and trouble shooter for IBM at the old age of 20. by the time i turned 22 I was head programmer and systems analyst with NASA working on the Gemini and Apollo space program for 15 yrs. Never judge a book by it's cover
So even when I saw this for the first time this scene made no sense! It had not been used ever, so there was nothing inputted into it, so how could. “ we have numbers”. That’s like spitting out an answer when there was no question .
My mom was a keypunch operator in the 60’s with the DMV. She used to bring home grocery bags of the chads that my brother and I took to high school football games as confetti. They use to hate to see us coming.
The failure rate in manufacturing computer chips and components was/is so high that it would be unacceptable in any other industry. It's just the need for computing is so high also. It's like oil. The cost of exploration, infrastructure, and clean-up are so high that nobody would invest in it so the entire industry is subsidized by tax payers. Nobody would invest in oil if the government was paying them. But we need the oil...
My maternal grandmother actually did coding development for the original IBM OS/360 operating system that they put on their mainframes starting in the late 60s. Always made me proud.
My grandfather on my dad's side worked for NASA as a mathematician around this this time. When I heard what this movie was about I realized he may have known these women. Unfortunately before my dad could look at his notes they were stolen from storage and probably thrown out the thieves thinking it was junk.
I actually learned computer programming in COBOL, BASIC, RAMIS, RPG and a couple of other now defunct languages on one of these beautiful beasts. Our computer had no hard drive. The storage tapes had a 20 megabyte capacity and that seemed huge.
@@davy_K IBM mainframes still exist. The current line of IBM mainframes is the z15 and they run the z/OS, z/VSE, and z/VM operating systems. Applications written in COBOL still run on those systems.
For all you young fellas, back then if you worked for IBM you wore a WHITE shirt and tie. There is a story of the time Tom Watson, the IBM Chairman got on the elevator and one guy was wearing a blue shirt, he was fired.
My Dad worked for IBM from about 41-67. Until well into the 50s, the preferred shirt had a detachable collar. My Mom had to launder the shirts and collars separately and then reattach them after she ironed them. I worked for IBM for a summer in the 80s, and by that time non-white shirts were pretty routine. We were even allowed to take out suit jackets off in the office unless we had meetings or went down to the cafeteria. IBM is completely casual now, except for some sales people.
Tape drives and rigid disk drives both were in use at the time, I expect the movie used tape drives mostly because they're iconic. and watching the reels spin gives you something to look at. Disk drives are just big metal boxes that don't do anything but sit there, hum, and make clicking noises. You can't get good footage out of that. Floppy drives (even the 8" ones) are pretty much post-Apollo. with only a little bit of overlap.
And here we are watching this clip on devices with more computing power than the entirety of the world at the time.
And watch some of the greatest space programs Like SpaceX that will take us to a new level of exploration with some wonderful ladys and gentlemen of todays workforce. WOW
People like to say things like your wristwatch has more computing power than x. But generally that’s only true in a very limited sense. Sure your ipad is faster and had more ram than some of the mainframes from the 60s/70s, but does it have 50,000 dedicated i/o channels that can all be responded to in real time?
@@stargazer7644 - Not sure what the hell you're smoking, but today's supercomputers have over 1,000,000,000x (1 billion) times more computing power than supercomputers from the 1960's... and there weren't that many computers in the world back then.
Today's regular computers definitely have more computing power than those supercomputers... it's not even close. More than the entire world might be debatable though.
@@Kevin-bt4wb What am I smoking? What are you smoking? Who said anything about supercomputers? These weren't supercomputers, they were standard business machines. Your ipad also isn't a supercomputer. And once again, I'd like to see you hook 50,000 serial terminals up to your ipad. Ram and CPU speed aren't the only measures of a computer's power. These old mainframes had ENORMOUS amounts of I/O. I know because I ran one back in the day with >50,000 lines on it.
@@stargazer7644 - The CDC 6600, which is generally considered the worlds first supercomputer, came out in 1964, 3 years after this movie's timeframe (1961). The computer she uses in the movie is an IBM 7090.
Don't be lazy, look up the *COMPUTING POWER* of the CDC 6600 compared to todays computers. There's dozens of links on the internet. Everything I said was accurate and an understatement, because I used the world's first supercomputer (CDC 6600) instead of the much slower (30x slower) IBM 7090 used in the movie.
There's actually tables all over the internet that show COMPUTING POWER and have today's computers and the IBM 7090 listed in the same table.
Once again, don't be lazy. Do actual research and learn what the definition of *COMPUTING POWER* is for starters.
My Computer Lab teacher at school was married to a lecturer at a local university. They still had a old punch card reader and mainframe in the Computer lab. She taught us the basics of entering data using punch cards and had us all set up a very basic formula. Then he took them to work and ran them after hours, bringing us a printout of the results. It was out first practical test. I passed. Mine are framed and hang in my study. 32 years later, I'm a Senior Integration Engineer, but I still look at it and smile.
You should! I look at my culinary degree every once in a while and I smile to myself although I have been a plumber for 22 years go figure!
@@chefbillybaroo2056 Your just at the "other end" of the food business....
@@timengineman2nd714 That’s gold man 😂
At school in New Zealand around 1974 the maths teacher had us fill out punch cards for a problem and a friend of his ran them on the University of Waikato IBM machine after hours, about a week later he came into class and gave us all a stack of paper about 2 inches high. Mine was great for a page and a half then about 50 pages of error messages.
1979, I started programming using PL/I written on coding pads and entered using punch cards. The 10MB hard drives were 2 feet across and had several platters. Printing was back to punched cards, punched tape or onto a hugely noisy line-printer that spat out 17" green-lined paper at a prodigious rate. Our water-cooled mainframe had a massive 16MB of core memory and, just about, multitasked. *Proper* computing, that was.
My mother was presented the opportunity to learn how to set type with a punchcard IBM in the early seventies at the Park Trail Gazette. That computer made her a technical publications editor for the Army. She simply read the manual. Ladies are good about that. If there is anything I learned in life, it’s that you can improve and do anything if you know how to read well and you can get that information for free from the public library system.
Its crazy how that's true even today. I practice electrical engineering and believe me I always find critical mistakes left out in customer products because someone missed the errata or forgot that section in the datasheet for the chip IC being used. My first goto to anyone facing issues nowadays is "Have you read the datasheet?"
That is an amazing story. In Grades 5 and 6 My teacher Mr Walker made us read one books per week. He didn’t care what is was but we had to read and do a book report on it. At first I struggled but got I to reading The Three Investigators and the Hardy Boys I ended up being a fast, plus 1000 wpm, with strong retention. It helped me thru high school, college, University and life
"How is that done?"
Me: "RTFM"
@@Jay369 Old school.
My girlfriend was talking about how her brother and his wife work well together because she's calm and can read the manual on things and he has a hot head and gets frustrated so what they do is she just tells him the steps and he does them. My GF also has a hot-head and hasn't realized I'm the read-the-manual type yet, even though I'm a dude. She will.
I love that little smile she gives herself at the end like "Yes, gentleman, I DO know how to work this machine." lol
Unfortunately this scene is completely unrealistic. Both her and the guys wouldn’t have acted like that.
This movie wanted to be an agenda movie and screwed up its opportunity to honestly celebrate the woman in the space program.
@@RogerWilco1 It is necessary! It shows that Dorothy Vaughan was at the start of the computer program and became a leader in computer programing for NASA. The behavior is accurate for the times. But how would I know? Decades later when men should have finally matured, I was denied employment as a scientist because I am a woman. That agency lost the contract because there wasn't a biologist on staff. It still happens.
In reality the "gentlemen" who came from IBM be like:
"Is that supposed to impress us? Our company literally wrote the book on this machine and ways to program it after designing and building it - congratulations wench you can read and follow instructions, you're clearly a genius......." 😒
FORTRAN was actually invented by engineers at IBM - the same company that made and installed that computer at NASA in the first place.
This makes this entire "oh wow" plot even more ridiculous, because it obscures the basic knowledge of the IBM engineers that installed the computer, not to mention the vastly more talented computer scientist/engineer (and woman!) Lois Haibt who worked on the FORTRAN development team at IBM in 1957 - 4 years before the main events of the movie start!
Trust Hollywood to praise a mere technician for something accomplished years before them by more talent individuals.
It's the equivalent of praising the first doctors to inject a patient with commercially produced penicilin, rather than the scientists who discovered and isolated it for use.
@@christinemeleg4535 It wasn’t because you are a woman.
My goodness the two men in the comment section are just getting their painted in a twist typing essays on how these women didn’t do anything yall there’s a reason these ladies had a movie after them and not the people you mentioned.lawrdt
"What's your name? You can't be in here."
"...what's your name? We're not letting you go."
Pretty much!
ah punch cards....those lovely pieces of...(enter expletive word here)....we used to use....what fun times they were.....
We used to put a ton of chads on a box, linked to a string, so that when the subject opened his overhead bin all Hell would break loose.
I love the sarcasm pouring out of you through my phone screen🤣
Kindred spirit 😁
Barry, My "1st introduction" to "Computers" were via "Mark Sense Cards" and I still remember the "9th Edge!"
shoe box filled with punch cards and if you dropped it you were totally effed.
That's why we ALWAYS put sequence numbers on our punch cards. Anyone that punched their card decks and did NOT use sequence numbers was just asking to have them get dropped at some point, Not everyone always handled the cards decks so carefully.
I learned BASIC using Hollerith cards. It seemed like magic back then. When I finally got a computer with a 20mb hard drive I thought "I'll NEVER fill this up!"
You're in good company. Bill Gates once thought "640k of RAM ought to be enough for everone."
Ahhh.....the nostalgia of it all. Damn!, suddenly I feel reeeaally old.
FORTRAN IV.
Hughes 5118, ah yes
i remember saying the same thing about my 4tb hard drive.
When I was on B-1 flight test in the mid 80s we still had 2 B-1A models from the 1970s flying. One test for the flight controls was loaded into the system from a punch card reader. When the engineer brought out the stack of punch cards he said if ANYONE made him drop or mix up the cards they would be killed, period.
Going from there to floppy disks wasn't as different. Getting a bunch of floppies out of order would be hell. The difference would be, the floppy disks wouldn't be as vulnerable to a gust of wind.
Had a punch card machine in college, with a little toggle switch near the top. Flip the switch, and the machine would print out a sequence number on the card in addition to the instruction on the card. Or you could always hold a batch of cards together and draw a diagonal line across the tops with a marker. Dropping your cards was inevitable. Dropping them a second time without a fail safe was YOUR fault.
@Richard Gleaves We did the same thing with slides - where even top and bottom alignment counted. Saved the day with many presentations!
My mom recalled this one time a co-worker dropped their cards, and cried there on the spot.
@@TchaikovskyFDR - What? No "Rubber Bands" back then? 😳🥴
In college, you took your punch card stack to the computer building, gave them to the lady, and you went back the next day to find out if they ran correctly. . . . Old punch cards, with the holes, you took home, stapled them into cones, stapled the cones together like a chrysanthenum flower wreath, and sprayed it gold, as a Christmas door hanging decoration. Or you wrote food recipes on them.
Where I went to college, we took our cards to the RJE card reader. Toward finals week, turnaround time could be 30 hours…. All thanks to the business majors…we’ll, maybe all, but primarily…
And once you'd figured out how the "control cards" worked (the ones that restricted the amount of time and memory students were allowed to use it was a simple matter to override those.
I hated punch cards. People don't know how lucky they are not to deal with this.
At school in 1978 our cards were posted to a university in the nearest city and you waited until you got run or failed to run back in time for the following week's session.
We had an Amdahl 360 as our mainframe computer back in the mid-70s at University of Cincinnasty, with weird monochrome amber monitors that couldn't show moving images and were 'erased' with a flash button. The Singer card reader could read at least two cards per second, and much of the monitor's internal phosphor coating was flaking off. Stone Age stuff now, as is the Fortran 4 I learned to "program" in. Glad it's gone!
I know she wouldnt be able to say it without repercussion. But i like "Hey you cant be in here that is a very delicate piece of equipment" and shes like "Explains how you were able to break it"
LMAO!!
What an incrediably stupid thing to say
@@PlagueRunner more people agree with me im right get fucked nerd lmao
I got that vibe from her expression too no repercussions here
It wasn't broken. They just didn't know how to use it.
If you were around in those very early days of computing, you'd know that wasn't an uncommon occurrence, lol.
I remember my first time using a computer in 1984 when I was in intermediate-school, it was an Apple-IIe, I have fond memories of that computer.
Mine was a TRS-80 model IV by Radio shack. 1983
I learned BASIC on a TRS-80 that used a cassette player to load programs instead of a disk drive.
A really great movie, shows the amazing power of people without boundaries GOD BLESS from Australia 🇦🇺 💕
I need to see this film in its entirety, amazed with what has happened from the clips on TH-cam.
Reminder to watch it if you haven't, it's really worth it!
I only knew about this film the other day and I have ordered it already..................
It's an amazing film!
Brilliant movie 😃
It is a hell of a good movie to watch!
I guess I am among the last programmers to ever punch a physical card for my job. In 1989, I was the most junior programmer/analyst at Miami University. So, I got called in at night for system support. We had a number of small jobs that were only run once or twice a year, and had been running without change for twenty years or more. So, the source code for these jobs had never been converted from card deck to tape. The card reader physically mangled one of the cards in the source deck, so I came in, in the middle of the night and repunched the one destroyed card. So my career contains the smallest possible link to the card era. One card.
It was always fun when a high speed reader mangled a card and then threw up a bunch more. Or a large deck swelled due to humidity. Good times
Very few can appreciate that story like I can. I was on the punch cards back at Northern Illinois University from 1980-1984. That era was right at the end of punch cards. We got terminals when I was a senior. For whatever reason, I have never admitted to anyone that I was working on punch cards (I think from a Burrough's) puncher, back in my youth. But after your punch, the era was over huh. They gotta make a movie called "The Final Punch"
@@dxwallace55 I took a single FORTRAN class in 1985 that was on cards, everything else was on terminals. So, I had at least used an 029 card punch before. But I only punched a single card as an actual employee.
@@robynharris7179 LOL!! I remember Fortran. I had one class in 1982.I was the "King of COBOL" however. Strange enough, there are now a shortage of Cobol programmers because so few know it an it is still used quite a bit like in Insurance companies like Blue Cross, who run mainframes (a.k.a., "Heavy Metal") to process volumes of data. I guess what goes around comes around.
I've been into IBM Cognos Business Intelligence for the past 20 years and Tableau for the past 4 years, and I don't even put the older years on my resume!!! Would like be a musician telling the band leader about your 8-track players LOL!!! The scene in front of the IBM with the tape reels brings back memories though.
@@dxwallace55 I had never used FORTRAN in my career. I finally decided to throw all my books away in 2011. Two months later I got an engagement converting an enormous FORTRAN based system written in 1959 to C#. The documentation was going to cost almost $4,000 to replace. So, my boss told me to just figure it out on my own. Never fails. You never need it till you don’t have it.
I LOVE this movie! I get emotional when I watch Dorothy walk her team across the campus and into the computer room. Great acting by all and I am a big fan of the real life first ladies of computing.
That's sad.. and no it isn't. The racism/bigotry in this movie is fictional, total lies. The real story UNITES and doesn't tear down white people and men.. disgusting
In the 70s I did overnight runs using card decks 18” long. Got the printout back next morning (2” thick), spotted the errors, re-punched a card or two, and re-submitted the card deck....After a few weeks the purpose had become getting the thing to work ... quite forgot the technical question that was the point of it all.
I had a friend, a senior analyst, smartest guy I've ever met. Kept a stack of those cards at his desk to remind how far he came.
I still have a long spool of paper tape stored in an old 35mm film canister. It's in 7-bit ebdic.
I'm 70 and still have network certifications - we've definitely come a long way.
Michael Mayfield- EBCDIC? I’m old too.
@@ronaldhorne5106 A-I, J-R, S-Z. I remember those groupings. And the letters J through R represented the negative numbers -1 to -9.
My father as a young executive of a bank in Brockton Massachusetts was tasked with settng up the computer system at the bank in the late 60's/early 70's. He knew little about them but was a fast learner. In the late 70's before he passed away. I remember he owned a calculator but never used it. Did all the calculations in his head. He taught me how to use a slide rule. Today people could not survive without computers.
I taught a entry level algebra class, the students all in high school, could not do basic arithmetic. So I took all the calculators, locked them up and told the class they have all achieved incredible notoriety, they all failed. Until they passed a basic arithmetic test they were failures and their final grade for the year would reflect that. I used a slide rule too, but I did teach them the lessons in arithmetic they should have learned in grade school, no algebra for them! Lots of angry parents but the administration showed them the dismal failures on paper. They were silent. Every student passed basic arithmetic.
Tomorrow people cannot survive because of the computer
When AI controls Nanotech.
Game Over.
Do Not Fold, Spindle , or Mutilate... IBM 360 was my first. Loading the 'Boot' deck before class started was my job. Until one day when it wouldn't and they had to a tech $25.00/hr plus mileage to drive up from Dallas to work two weeks to finally figure out the timing was off from the card feeder and the card reader. Just a simple screwdriver adjustment in the end.
Yeah, I owned a PDP-12 in my parents' garage for a while, it had a variable-speed serial interface. The speed was adjusted by a trimmer resistor.
Having pre-Mainframe IBM myself, this computer had less compute power than your Apple Watch, and yet, it was the IBM Computer of the Day.... amazing... I still liked Taraji's character much better than an old pre-mainframe computer running a hamstrung DOS OS (not the DOS of PC days) .... in the end though, she saved the day....
My mother worked as a keypunch operator (typer of the holes in the cards seen here) at the phone company. The computer was a three story building, plus basement. The keypunch operators were on the second floor, the reel-to-reel magnetic tape type memory, as seen in this clip, were on the third, the computer specialists/maintainers, admin, and management offices were on the first, and the computer was in the basement where it was easier to keep cool.
Four floors dedicated to one computer; A computer that was really just a huge database.
The cards were then fed into a reader that transferred their data to the reel-to-reel magnetic tape memory upstairs. Those reels of memory would then be loaded and run through the actual computer that placed the data in customer records on other magnetic memory tapes. That's all that four floors of computer actually did: Match up and update customer records.
How big was this operation before the computer took over its processing? And the error rate between human and computer processing? Yeah, 4 stories is big but probably worth it over the long term as it was faster and had less errors.
So it was a four storey Excel Spreadsheet then?
The tapes were not magnetic, they had holes punched in them too.
@@ajkendro3413 Nope, those are IBM 729 or 9-track tapes.
@@ajkendro3413 Teletype Operator here too.
Dorothy Vonn, super hero with the big brain!! ❤
I used a HP computer system in 1982 that had a disc/hard drive the size of a small refrigerator with 2.2 MB of memory. Visitors were AMAZED! It ran an automated accelerometer calibration (shaker) system for the USN. Fun times.
Back in the 80s... worked on the Univac 9000 series at Naval Station Roosevelt Roads in Puerto Rico. To think that my phone has way more computing power and memory than those rooms full of equipment back in the day.
A scientific calculator has more computing power than a room full of that equipment.
I remember those machines; worked at the phone company for awhile. We sent out those crazy punch cards for commercial phone bills; sometimes boxes of them, if the account was large enough.
Lily Tomlin even had a standup routine about getting back at the phone company using the cards. 🤭
Ironic that the data was not sent via phone modem.
I took both BASIC and FORTRAN in college in 1971 and remember being at the computer center in the evening typing my programs' punch cards. 80 characters per card and don't ever get them out of order. The punches (perhaps the original hanging chads) were gathered and made for great confetti fights.
I learned COBOL and FORTRAN programming using punch cards punched from an IBM 029 and 129. Later, I built a Heathkit H9 CRT terminal and connected it to the Honeywell 6023 mainframe with a modem and did my programming, compiling, and debugging online from home while the other students had to sweat it out on the limited amount of keypunch machines in the computer lab and submit their decks of cards and wait for their results to come back from the computer operator. Learning to program in a batch processing environment separated the men from the boys.
That's why the last few columns were reserved for a sequence number. That way you could run the cards through a sorter and get them back into proper order.
My first "computer" was a Sinclair 1000. The program was loaded using cassette tape and it had 16KB of internal Ram and a 16KB RAM pack for a total of 32KB, that at the time was considered HUGE memory. LOL
My PlayStation has an internal memory that is almost 20 million times that size.....it’s crazy.
That was my first computer as well. I remember typing out my first program on it, to make a sphere graphic. Took forever! Good memories, ha.
Mine was a Tandy TRS80.
My first computer : Sinclair ZX81 , 1kb RAM, 8kb ROM. 😳
Mine was similar ,an Oric (sp?). With a tape cassette. 😆😆
I remember taking a Fortran IV class after work ~1977, and using those cards. A few years later at a new job, I needed to do some Fortran and asked 'where is the Key punch?' Just use the 3270 terminal in the alcove. How fast things changed. A 500MB disk was bigger than a dish washer and I just put a 1T SSD into my laptop. And Who needs more than 640K of RAM :/
That's nothing, did you ever use Fortran II?
I remember those punch cards oh so well. The joy of getting back the cards from the punch bureau , checking them, putting the stack of several hundred cards on your desk and having some numpty knock them over and having to sort them manually into the right order. Oh what fun ! Computers with less memory than one of those talking birthday cards.
@foot bru Oh, yes, I remember fanfold computer paper! I also remember 3 part report paper and having to split it manually because the bank was too cheap to pay for an automated splitter. I had to be there so I might as well do something useful! And you tell the young ones of the fun and games and they don't think it is possible.
Did you ever read of the bastard operator from hell? And dream of doing some of those things?
That's why the last few columns were reserved for a sequence number. That way you could run the cards through a sorter and get them back into proper order.
@@mymartianhome The "splitter" was called a decollator, for one example. The machine that separated pages was the "burster."
I spent many hours sitting at a keypunch machine during my time in the Air Force in the 70s. I have no idea just how many boxes of those IBM cards I went through!
USAF 1990.. trained punch cards, magnetic reel to reel, paper tape reader, comm centers. There must be more to this scene, because grabbing half a very small deck of punch cards and running it through like that isn't going to fix anything.
Way more. The system wasn't set up correctly. She poured through the manuals, troubleshot the system, and got it reading the input again.
I remember taking my cards to the engineering department. Someone would call our lab to let us know our printouts were ready. Chemistry at its best in the 60's and 70's.
Our college computer had the newest laser printer. The big joke was a program you could run, where it would count to a million, putting one number on every sheet of printout. Then we would sneak that stack of cards in, and wait for them to be read. The printer would immediately spool off the entire roll of paper, up into the air and all over the room.
Punch cards had been phased out by then. I took University level Chemistry in the 1970's, no computer cards.
@@christinemeleg4535 I entered the University of British Columbia in 1979 pursuing a Chemical Engineering degree. The first-year engineering classes were required to take a Computer Science course that used FORTRAN in which the data was entered using punch cards. I think we were the last class that used them.
1969, I was programming an IBM 1620, that had a MASSIVE 20 Megabyte Hard drive (12" platters), 1622 Reader/Punch and used a Selectric typewriter for the operator I/O (about 10 characters per second). Primary output was to a line printer, but I forget the model number for it.
Was it an IBM 1403?
@@user-eh2ul3bx3y The line printer available for the IBM 1620 was the IBM 1443. Type bars are vertical bars, one for each print position in a line. Each bar is one character wide with the printer's entire character set: either alphabetic characters, including numerals and symbols, or just numerals and symbols, molded into the front surface in a single column. In printing, each bar is raised up until the correct character for that print position was opposite the paper, whereupon the bar is pushed toward the paper, so that the correct numeral or letter pressed against the ribbon, striking the paper much the way type slugs leave an impression on paper in a standard typewriter. Each bar had to be brought up into the correct position and then drop back down in preparation to print the next line.
@@RaymondHng Now that jogged my memory, the printer was not a bar type, but a band printer. The card reader/punch was a 1622 - standard 80 column Hollerith. The selectric typewriter, was the operator's I/O, and not the line printer.
Amazing woman, specially given her foresight to accept computers as the future without fighting it and taking her team of girls along.
Dude this entire movie is practically fiction. How are you actually buying into this BS?
The team consisted of women, not "girls". They were mature highly educated women.
@@DontDrinkthatstuffyou do know that the internet exists, right? If it were fiction, why did NASA name a building after one of the ladies? I suggest you open a history book. 🤡
well she had no choice; that mechanical computer was in a bit of time about to put the human computers out of work, and she realized it. so she taught herself how to program it and then taught her team how, do they had a future right alongside the machine.
@@DontDrinkthatstuff - Entire movie is practically fiction - except that the three main characters DID exist and published memoirs. Are YOU aware?
Ah! I remember the time. My first machine was a 1620, then an 1130 (years later I was offered it if I would just take it away... progress) and finally an RCA Spectra 70, a 370 lookalike. Then I put together an IMSAI at home and had my *own* machine. 2 MHz, 64k of memory and two, count 'em, two 1 MByte 8" floppies. A real word processor and you could play Space Invaders. Ooh.
"1130 (years later I was offered it if I would just take it away... " --- That never happened. IBM never sold the 1130 to anyone in the US, they leased the 1130 to customers, And when IBM was through leasing that machine to a customer IBM would carefully remove it from the customer's location and transport it to a car crusher or metal shredder to thoroughly turn the 1130 into scrap so that could never be used again, no parts were left that could be used for spare parts. (In Europe a very small number of systems, just a handful were sold, not leased to government agencies).
Fantastic movie. Disappointing it took this long to recognize these very talented ladies.
all it took was reading the instruction manual....no wonder the men couldn't figure it out.
Sometimes it just takes a fresh perspective/eyes to see the solution... Dorothy can fix... A N Y T H I N G !!!!!! Now... wish she was around to fix my computer!! :-)
She was too kind. And a Southerner, so she knew what to do - she just didn't do it. But I would have. Wait a few seconds for them to realize that things were working, and then look over her shoulder and say "You're welcome."
Not a polite way to use "you're welcome." It's insincere and intended to shame. If you want colleagues to think of you as bright and conscientious, best to avoid mean-spirited zingers.
@@hd-xc2lz
You are correct of course. It just ticks me off to see them ignore her simply because she was a black woman. Matching their attitude though, makes you their equal. My bad.
@@julieenslow5915 Yes, but it's a fictional scenario created to instill a feeling of outrage in the audience, conceived by a pair of white screenwriters (not in the original book). I don't doubt for a second that these African American women were treated awfully, but I just can't get angry over such manipulative filmmaking.
@@hd-xc2lz
oh! You are one of THOSE!! LOL!! I look at it as a window into a real event. You look at like a play on a stage. They could be one and the same but I just have a huge imagination and so I play it a little too real for many people. But I am an artist and I need that imagination so I don't apologize for it. Ever.
@@julieenslow5915 I'm an artist as well, but please tell me about the "THOSE" to whom I belong. Not a rhetorical request, I'm interested to hear. To me the film felt too much like cheesy old Soviet Socialist Realism, more about ethical instruction than creating three dimensional characters, a world populated only by saints and sinners. I prefer my worlds gray and my characters flawed.
In this show, Dorothy IS the wizard!
In the early 80's i had to read the processor's manual of one of my first ccomputers then i wrote an assembler-disassembler program during Xmas holidays. All was stored on ma radio-tape recorder. I was 15yo, it was a very good time !
Ah the joys of punched cards. Back in the very early 70s as a post grad I used the university ICL1906S - all FORTRAN prog on cards. I would submit a job early morning and collect the output the next afternoon (if I was lucky). I would take the shoe box(es) of cards go to my student flat and find the errors. Come Christmas, I gave up and went home for food etc. When I came back I found out I have left the cards in my car. The damp had warped all the cards (500+). Almost suicidal, but saved by sandwiching them between two metal plates and putting in a vacuum chamber for a couple of days.
This is one movie I never see in my thrift store rounds, this and Flight of the Intruder.
Sadly I have seen the book on the shelves in NYC.
That's because it's so damn good, that once someone watches it they can't give it away!!!
When I registered for classes in college in 1971, we collected a punch card for each class and turned them in to register. I still have a blank IBM punch card from when I mucked about in the Academic Computing area. Talk about a piece of retro history.
I'm not sure I remember correctly, but I think a college I went to did that.
Some companies sent bills with a part of a punch card. They had adapters that would allow the card readers to handle the shorter cards. The customer was supposed to return the card with the payment. Customers were instructed "Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate."
@@jamesfunk7614 The phone company would send a bill to the customer with a punch card that was suppose to be mailed back with a check for payment. My high school COBOL teacher told us he once punched a few extra holes in the card and mailed it back along with a check. He got a stern letter from the phone company later telling him not to do that again.
The engineers are like "damn we can't figure this out"
Dorothy is like "I got stuff to calculate if you guys don't mind"
And a lie
Dorothy didn't fix anything in real life.
Do not take movies to serious. Dorothy WAS a (real) great person with great skills but this is not how people at NASA and such worked together. And i am 100% sure the real Dorothy would be upset to see that 2 guys there portrait as some stupids. You are not there if you are like that and even when you do not like a person you usually respect their skills. I worked on company level in some related field and thats pretty much hollywoods idea about people they did not really know and understood - and which they do not like usually.
those cards are a pain. we would send them to the board of education. wait three weeks to find out if they worked.
And, oddly enough, the board of education never did.
When mainframes computers required an entire floor of its own we never dreamed we’d own a personal computer.
I learned how to type punch cards when I was a senior in high school. I never used that skill, though.
I'm so grateful for people like her they were the pioneers of modern day computing if it wasn't for them I would not be computers and programs today. First computer language I had to learn was FORTRAN and Unix.
Was the next language a higher communication command of the English language?
The VONN method: making smart guys look like fools
My first system was an old IBM 1620 Mod II that used punched cards. Wasn't as fast as the 7000 series but it was a decent machine for the time.
She doesn't fix it she figures out how to use it
You missed the prior scene that isn't part of this clip for some reason.
yes, Dorothy changes a pin or two in an electrical panel that gets the machine to operate
.. _around __0:50__ in the following clip_
> vimeo.com/213129047
@@Cacille Still doesn't "fix it". She knows what dip switches (or whatever) to set for the machine to operate properly. You may not be familiar with 8088 machines but you had to set how much on-board memory you had for it to work properly. If the memory was set incorrectly the machine would not see all its memory-it wasn't broke and did not need "fixing" it just needed to be configured correctly. If she replaced a burned-out resistor or bad capacitor then she would have fixed the machine-what she did, no.
@@ExWEIMan What IS is?
@@gailtaylor1636 Is is the third person singular of the present tense of be.
In Houston, Tx 1966 I found the IBM 1620 on the Rice University campus. About 8 weeks later I had a part-time job programming the IBM 360/50 with punched cards in PL/1 and Assembler.
One of my favorite scenes ever. Love this character.
I love the scene short before here, when she says to the Computer while reading the manual:"Oh, you have a brain. That's I can work with."
My dearly departed Dad helped design and create one of the first 'punch card' computerised banking systems in the early seventies for ANZ Bank in London!. I still have a rejected IBM chip encased in plastic as a key ring he got from IBM on a business trip to them to look at the kit they were offering. I also have memories of going to work with Dad on weekends watching the cards being loaded ready for test runs prior to rollout. I might add, the teams individual 'desktops or work stations' which they wrote/designed the code on only had 32kb of ram, 16 of which was needed to make the things run!.......
Was in the movie I saw. Thank goodness for the smart hard working computers that helped our space flights
According to the movie, it was the completely overblown but factually miniscule contributions of blacks that made the space program successful.
I remember doing a small punchcard query for senior year math class. I remember Wang and IBM displaywriter stand-alone word processing machines. Ah, those were the days.
She has been one of my favorite actresses for quite some time now . I love this woman.
35 years ago I was a mobile IT bod looking after Unix based accounting systems for various clients the company had, was sent to Guinness at Hanger Lane got sent to the end of the site to a building and when I walked in was greeted buy the office manager and saw a IBM punch card computer and a bank of reel to reels, I wish they had digital cameras back then, it looked amazing.
This entire movie was a work of fiction.
disagree
You are wrong!! This entire movie was based on a true story that was made for the cinema with embellishments to make it more interesting! These Black women existed and were very intelligent even more so than the men!!
Back in 70s friends buddy used ISU computer and computer designed a 4 link set up for a Camaro, they then cut floor and tink up, moved it all inboard and built a 4 link on stock Camaro underpinnings. Reason was this was before NHRA rules changed and allowed 2x3 mild wall rear team rails to be swapped in.
Both my parents had to do this job when they first started. Even in the 80s a lot of businesses has this.
Since you had to wait until the next day most times to get your report, I would submit multiple decks for the same program. Hopefully, at least one of them might work correctly. Our university used an IBM 360 mainframe.
I absolutely LOVE this movie
I worked on a lot of mainframes, but the first had 20K (yes, K) of memory, 5 tape drives, no disks, a card reader/punch and a printer. We ran an insurance company with it.
Still got a bundle of those punch cards.. used to have boxes of them.. used them up for taking notes during my second degree.. very convenient
It would be nice to know exactly what she did that "fixed" the problem.
Turned it off and on again.
Watch the movie then
probably kicked it
She put in the cards that ran the bootloader software that started it up. The "big brain boys" didn't know they had to do that. Back in those days, bootloaders were not integrated, every time you started it up, you had to tell the computer HOW to compute first, THEN start running programming on it.
She read the manual
I took a keypunch operator class in high school and have been hooked on computers ever since. 😀
Sooo...in all of NASA nobody knew how to work a computer except her?
It's "based on a true story."
@@kerryedavis ah....inspired by
My mom, an engineering aid at Boeing's Plant 2 wind tunnel facility, went through their training program for Fortran because engineers can't be bothered with such things. I got into computers in the late seventies when I bought an Apple 2 and taught myself programming, but somehow we never talked about dealing with computers. Weird.
Anyway, an old timer I hung out with told me the trick with those punch cards used to feed information into a computer was to take a felt tip pen and draw a diagonal line on the side of the stack of cards, so if they get dropped or some such it was a lot faster to get them back into order.
That's one shortcut. But That's why the last few columns were reserved for a sequence number. That way you could run the cards through a sorter and get them back into proper order.
One of the greatest movies of our generation
My dad was an plant scientist and in the 60s used to bring home a statistical analyzer that ran on punch cards to process overnight. It was about three times the size of a manual typewriter but much heavier. I think he must have kept all the cards after the data was ingested, because until he died recently he used those cards for notes to his family and himself.
I remember punch cards in college. Pisses me off because in a matter of 1 or 2 years personal computers, networked pcs, databases, programming languages, plus sun workstations and Digital VAX systems all replaced this big IBM systems. I felt sorry for those kids who learned punch cards on mainframes, graduated, and found in a few short years their punch card knowledge was obsolete...they either learn the new technology themselves or go back to school and learn it. I was angry because by the time I graduated colleges were offering programming and databases which really pissed me off because I needed that knowledge badly after I graduated.
In the movie, she teached herself Fortran from a book. I don't know if that what happens but anyoine that teaches herself Fortran has my respect
You would hardly need a 20 page book to learn Fortran. I learned it in high school in the late 80s.
Well maybe you can teach yourself proper grammar.
@@travisfrost5057 Aren't you a clever idiot.
@@Martyupnorth, Dorothy Vaughn taught herself and her staff FORTRAN in the 60s when it was relatively new. As the movie shows she did this on her own, when women weren’t allowed into the computer rooms. Your ability to learn it once it was virtually obsolete, when great resources were available, when (I’m guessing) it wasn’t your first computer language, pales as an accomplishment next to Mrs. Vaughn’s.
@@dorothyyoung8231 whatever makes you feel good. Fortran is a super simple language to learn. The original version had 32 statements.
I remember learning to program in Fortran with those punch cards back in the late seventies.
A simplistic, revisionist version of events...who knows what the next 'remake' of these events will be portrayed as...'her' role will be played by a Mexican 'man' as they are underrepresented in science history...😳
revisionist version of event
Citations
I went to college in the fall of 1978. Summer of '78 was the last quarter you were required to card punch your computer programs. I learned how to use a card punch to turn punch cards into decorative items. Like spelling my name in punch holes. You held it up and it spelled BILLL.
I dropped out of high school and attended a computer college in Chicago I worked at Stewart-Warner corp during the day and went to school at night learned Cobal---BAL--and RPG programing on the old IBM 360/20 COS system and after a year moved on to the 360/30 TOS/DOS/COS never got a high school diploma or a GED but went on to be a systems analyst and trouble shooter for IBM at the old age of 20. by the time i turned 22 I was head programmer and systems analyst with NASA working on the Gemini and Apollo space program for 15 yrs. Never judge a book by it's cover
So even when I saw this for the first time this scene made no sense! It had not been used ever, so there was nothing inputted into it, so how could. “ we have numbers”. That’s like spitting out an answer when there was no question .
Shhh ... You'll offended SJW's around the world
The film is *loosely based* on the book. It wasn't meant to be a blow-by-blow retelling of the book.
Imagine a world where you are expected to say “sorry” all day long. Breaks my heart.
I need more Octavia Spencer in my life
My mom was a keypunch operator in the 60’s with the DMV. She used to bring home grocery bags of the chads that my brother and I took to high school football games as confetti. They use to hate to see us coming.
The failure rate in manufacturing computer chips and components was/is so high that it would be unacceptable in any other industry. It's just the need for computing is so high also. It's like oil. The cost of exploration, infrastructure, and clean-up are so high that nobody would invest in it so the entire industry is subsidized by tax payers. Nobody would invest in oil if the government was paying them. But we need the oil...
ah punch cards the good old days when I started.
Lucky you!
Those tattoos on Jewish prisoners were their IBM punch card file numbers. People seem to forget that IBM sold them that.
Yeah but how comes nobody read the Manuel before tho ?
My maternal grandmother actually did coding development for the original IBM OS/360 operating system that they put on their mainframes starting in the late 60s. Always made me proud.
You should be!!! What a hero!!!
Brilliant, unsung heroes
My grandfather on my dad's side worked for NASA as a mathematician around this this time. When I heard what this movie was about I realized he may have known these women. Unfortunately before my dad could look at his notes they were stolen from storage and probably thrown out the thieves thinking it was junk.
That's what you call taking the initiative.
(Edited for spelling error)
I actually laughed on how quickly she got the machine to work and those guys could not even get it to work with everything they had 😂
I love this movie.
I actually learned computer programming in COBOL, BASIC, RAMIS, RPG and a couple of other now defunct languages on one of these beautiful beasts. Our computer had no hard drive. The storage tapes had a 20 megabyte capacity and that seemed huge.
COBOL is still rolling along. You can compile it into the .net framework now. :) Check out Microfocus COBOL.
@@davy_K IBM mainframes still exist. The current line of IBM mainframes is the z15 and they run the z/OS, z/VSE, and z/VM operating systems. Applications written in COBOL still run on those systems.
@@RaymondHng Nice. :) I was a COBOL programmer on VAX systems in the early 90s. VAX VMS is still in operation too as far as I know. Loved the VAX.
@@davy_K OpenVMS now, running on Compaq and other systems since DEC was absorbed into The Body.
For all you young fellas, back then if you worked for IBM you wore a WHITE shirt and tie. There is a story of the time Tom Watson, the IBM Chairman got on the elevator and one guy was wearing a blue shirt, he was fired.
@@georgepierson4920 white shirt, dark tie
This was exactly how DEC came close to overtaking IBM, they hired all the people who were sick of IBM's rules.
Glad we have moved away from that lunacy. What type of idiot fires a guy for the color shirt he wore?
My Dad worked for IBM from about 41-67. Until well into the 50s, the preferred shirt had a detachable collar. My Mom had to launder the shirts and collars separately and then reattach them after she ironed them. I worked for IBM for a summer in the 80s, and by that time non-white shirts were pretty routine. We were even allowed to take out suit jackets off in the office unless we had meetings or went down to the cafeteria. IBM is completely casual now, except for some sales people.
Tape drives and rigid disk drives both were in use at the time, I expect the movie used tape drives mostly because they're iconic. and watching the reels spin gives you something to look at. Disk drives are just big metal boxes that don't do anything but sit there, hum, and make clicking noises. You can't get good footage out of that. Floppy drives (even the 8" ones) are pretty much post-Apollo. with only a little bit of overlap.
Such an awesome movie!
Fun fact: you are literally holding that entire room of computing technology in your hand right now
And you still can't get to the moon.
@@peterrose5373 that’s quitter talk!
This was a great movie.
she educated herself on the IBM using a public library.
And a "borrowed" (stolen) book.
This is the Booker T Washington method of gaining respect.
I read the title as; Dorothy fixes the ICBM.
I'm thoroughly disappointed.