So from that, patching a programme was originally sticking a paper patch over a length of tape with errors on it and punching new holes.
It was a bloody long process for what now takes seconds to do something (for someone cleverer on the internet than me
) but I enjoyed those pre-historic days !
When I worked as a paper tape punch/verifier in the 70's , one person typed a batch of about 200 documents at a time(which had been previously been filled in by hand by other factory workers ) which produced miles of tape. This tape was then fed into another persons machine who then re-typed the whole batch of 200 documents again producing another few miles of tape of their own and corrected as you went along when the 2 didn't match up and editing /splicing the tape by hand.
Used to have to be able to read every code on the tape to see if it was the puncher or verifier who was right. Same with the punch cards.
All the millions of miles of verified tapes were then sent over to the big GEC mainframe computer building each night ( building still behind KFC when I went back last September ) to be fed into their main computers which produced the paperwork to come back to our factory for someone else to then work on. No wonder it took so many people to produce the results . More or less every paper document came through our department.
Even when we progressed to the 'space age' Key-to-disk' machines , we still had to write our own programs to then type all those 1000's of documents and have the original disks verified by being re-typed again .
Working on telex machines amazed me how we could type a document/letter to produce spools of paper tape. If you made an error typing it was either spliced to edit , or start again from scratch if a small document. This was fed back into the machine to send over the air waves to a company the other side of the world, which then produced spools of tape their end to put into their machine to produce a letter.
Became amazing when fax machines came in and could reproduce a document on another companies machine just by sticking the original document into the machine.
Used to love bashing away at those keys though , used to have to bash them down about half an inch. I was put into a national competition to find the fastest key operator in the UK as I was so fast , but went to pot when the examiner was standing behind watching me.
Worked on various systems since , and was set up at home in 1996 after having son working on their 'dial up' computer connection. I phoned GEC computer each morning & it rang me back for them to get the BT charges all day. The computer blokes
used to love escaping the factory for a bit when I rang them to say I'd "lost my cursor " off the screen in the early days , they could have just told me to move my mouse ,but a couple of them would come out to the house to find it
.
Only stopped a few years later as new security features stopped it being accessed from outside at the time.
The Good Old Days !