On Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:45:16 -0400 Ed Gurski <ed@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > The card reader jams were common I'll say one thing for punched cards though - a deck of cards and a duplicating punch were the best available text editor for many years :-). You could do block moves of text - just move a chunk of cards in the deck. You could insert characters on a line - just dup the card, then hold down the original real hard so it couldn't move when you get to the insert column, type your new charaters, then finish the dup. You could cut & paste by duping cards, then inserting the new ones in the right place. I seem to recall they paid some fantastic sum of money for an advanced system that would let you keep your card decks on disk and edit them and submit the jobs from the disk copy - no one used it, the editor was so awful - real cards worked much better. And from the latest stories on the Census bureau's attempt to computerize, I see the state of the art hasn't advanced much :-).
