Late last night, I woke up smiling, from a rather fun dream: Scene: rather late at night, but not as late as it was in the real world, and I'd stumbled upon some sort of storefront school of antiquated computer technology, while I was in an International Printing Museum uniform, following a docent shift there. It seems that I was having trouble getting invoices on a couple of debts, and so I'd written "request for invoice" letters about them, and for emphasis, I had somehow punched them into Hollerith cards, even though they're an obsolete technology. So I noticed a typo in one of the two Hollerith cards, and was considering ways to correct it by hand, when I stumbled upon this odd school. I went in, still in my IPM uniform, saw that there was a keypunch room, and asked to borrow a keypunch long enough to punch a corrected card. At the time, there were only two people in the keypunch room, and the professor, seeing my uniform, gave me full access, no questions asked. At about that point, other people started drifting in, and soon the keypunch room was crowded, and amusing hubbub ensued, including a large stack of (blank, I think) Hollerith cards getting knocked onto the floor. I woke up, almost laughing, while I was still setting up to punch the corrected card. I will add that while CSU Long Beach did have a student keypunch room during my five years there, none of the programming classes I took involved submitting batch jobs on cards, and it wasn't until I took a summer job at my old high school, during a brief period when they had an on-campus IBM 4341 as a student timeshare system, that I ever actually used a keypunch (and it was a non-IBM model, somewhat more advanced than the archetypal IBM 029).
