On Thursday 03 April 2008 22:58:29 Tim wrote: > On Thu, 2008-04-03 at 08:46 -0500, George Yanos wrote: > > Speaking as a geezer who still has thousands of punch cards in the > > basement, and carefully picked a color laserjet partly on the basis of > > its ability to print on them, punch cards were only rarely hacked. > > > > You could get the attention of the old phone company by sending back > > your punch card bill slip with different holes than the cards had when > > they sent them. > > Hahaha. I'm kind of surprised that they'd give something out to clients > that'd make them vulnerable. > > Way back when I worked in a library, we used barcode labels on each item > for the library management system. We'd have people return things with > extra lines coloured in the barcode, who always swore that they didn't > do it, and it must have been like that when they borrowed it. It never > occurred to them that we knew that was rubbish. The items were scanned > on the way out, and back on the way in. If it was tampered with > beforehand, they'd have errored when first scanned. We made them stump > up the cash for relabeling. > > -- > (This computer runs FC7, my others run FC4, FC5 & FC6, in case that's > important to the thread.) > > Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. > I read messages from the public lists. I'm sorry if I'm intruding on your privacy, but why on earth do you what to print on punch cards in 2008? Are these punch cards already punched? Is it for some sort of pre-Microsoft theme park merchandise? God, I hope you reply before I go to bed or I may lie awake the rest of the night wondering... I started working in 1984, two weeks before our punch room shut forever and re-trained the operators for word-processing. Apart from one colleague who kept a box-full for old times sake, most of the old boys (and three old girls) were glad to see the back of them (the cards that is, not the operators). Nick
