How long after becoming a Member does it take to have the (M) show up next to your name in posts?

You have to go thru initiation, learn the handshake, then hell week.

Hell week being where one posts how difficult it is to sell cottage manufacturer gear on Gear Swap, rejecting all the suggestions made by other members, and becoming increasingly irate and belligerent.

I thought the delay was due to outsourcing and overseas shipping issues. I believe the Chinese factory that used to build BPL's gear now makes the red "M".

You should be good to go tomorrow. The site operates via a batch overnight process. They have to gather all the punch cards from the computerized requests and manually take them over to the mainframe computer and feed the punch cards into the reader. Occasionally a card gets lost and you may have to sign up again.

"They have to gather all the punch cards from the computerized requests and manually take them over to the mainframe computer and feed the punch cards into the reader."

Back in the late 1960s, our main concern was to use a really good set of rubber bands to hold our card decks together. And then, once in a great while, somebody would throw their card deck into the card reader with the rubber bands still on. That always caused great gnashing of teeth.

Just think, an IBM System 360 probably lives in Bozeman, Montana.

–B.G.–

Punch cards? I was under the impression BPL was powered by hamsters running around their wheels. Updates occur when the day shift (located in the far east) hands over to the night shift (located in latin America).

Until you hit the refresh button?

Fair go. The hamsters have to be fed sometimes.

However, I do know that once you have paid the membership fee you can usually post in Gear Swap fairly soon afterwards. Try posting and see if it works.

However, and this is where the rubber bands seem to be a bit weak, it can take much longer before the M shows up in a channel posting display. I have no idea why the delay here. Different server maybe?

PS: if you fold an IBM punch card into a dart, it goe really well with the big fat rubber bands. You can get from the back of a large Uni lecture theatre to the blackboard at the front.

PPS: who still has any punch cards?

"PPS: who still has any punch cards?"

Oh ye of little faith.

I have a stock of new ones waiting for my next Fortran project.

–B.G.–

That image just gave me PTSD .

Hi Bob

Not only do I still have some unused punch cards – I also have several steel drawer units which were used for holding card stacks up to …2 ft long. They are great in the workshop for holding tools. About 12 drawers per unit.
Oh yes – one drawer is still full of blanks.
Useful card – good quality. Dunno when they will all get used though … :-)

Cheers

For some reason, the big Fortran projects don't show up as often as they used to.

–B.G.–

Until you get into massive nuclear- or astro-physics simulations. High Performance and Parallel Fortran are still the most convenient ways of programming massively parallel super-computers.

Don't laugh, but Basic and VB are still very popular at the other end :-) And Cobol still drives the commercial mainframes. Web programming? Trivial stuff for amateurs.

Cheers

Bob, I had to convert these progrms onto tapes. I like to think BPL has the real 16bps drives! Yeah it takes a day or two.

Congrats!! Your M has arrived.

If I never see another punch card in my life, it will be too soon. I'd say the same thing about Fortran, and you guys had to go and say that word.

We are the knights who say "Fortran!"

> How many people have written a program on punch cards and accidentally dropped them
> on the floor, accidentally shuffling them?

That's why we all moved to paper tape and ASR-33s.

Cheers

Jerry, you are showing your age…no further comment…