Rabbit hole: stumbling across two Portuguese punched cards(blog.jgc.org)
180 pointsby jgrahamc4 days ago10 comments
  • keybpo3 days ago
    Found a reference to ENIASA - Instituto de Informática de Engenharia SARL (computer science engeneering). Rereading your post, I'm not entirely sure if it was just an academic publishing from maybe the same group or if a new branch for computers derived from the mecanograph educational offers. Curious use of ordenador istead of computador as it is nowadays, makes me wonder if it was an early adoption of the term computer.

    It was submitted for registration and approved in 1970, according to Diário da República (similar to Federal Register in the US): https://files.dre.pt/gratuitos/3s/1970/09/1970d210s000.pdf , page 4, line 82 of that table. Or here: https://i.imgur.com/GyKPamu.png

    • nunobrito3 days ago
      It's still "ordenador" in Spain and "ordinateur" in French. Interesting that we moved forward to computer over the years.
      • ithkuil3 days ago
        Is this because these early computers were more often used to keep tabs and sort things (put things in order) rather than merely compute things?

        (I'm aware that in order to perform those tasks the processing unit will also have to perform arithmetic operations)

    • pjmlp3 days ago
      As Portuguese reaching 50, that is also native speaker in Spanish as well, this is the very first time I have seen any Portuguese content using the Spanish/French variant, instead of "computador".
    • jgrahamc3 days ago
      Yeah, I found that too. But that's all I found.
      • pedroaniceto3 days ago
        Read my comment below about the french language domination
  • Animats3 days ago
    The book has a picture of the IBM 2321 Data Cell Drive, 1964 to 1975.[1] That's an exotic peripheral for the original IBM System/360, a tape strip library. Before disks got big, there were various mechanical kludges to select storage media from a library and move them to a read/write unit. IBM had several such mechanical systems. This one was a commercial product with modest success.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_2321_Data_Cell

  • rcarmo3 days ago
    Look up a guy called Pedro Aniceto - he’ll tell you so many stories of when those cards were current here (he used to courier them across town when he was a kid)
  • anthk3 days ago
    I love these old advertisements. BTW, even in late and mid 80's, there were adverts on the Spanish Reader's Digest on courses about computers. I rememember showing images of both PDP front panels and maybe Altair 8800, not IBM PC's. These were top notch stuff for big corporations and banks filling their offices.

    BTW, on the 'computadora' term, these looked outdated, and to anyone non-Latin American descent here 'computadora' would mean an old IBM mainframe the size of two wardrobes and more.

    • pantulis3 days ago
      I remember those things being called "cerebros electrónicos".
      • anthk3 days ago
        More like the 60's and 70's, and infamously known because of the comic books. "Electronic Brains" in the 80's, maybe until 1981 or 1982.
        • pantulis2 days ago
          I think it was like the 80 or 81 that my dad referred to the computer in their company as "el cerebro electrónico" and it was a IBM System/34.
          • anthk2 days ago
            Yeah, what I said. After the IBM PC began to root in Spain (and micros like the ZX Spectrum), no one used neither cerebro electrónico nor computadora.
  • zahlman3 days ago
    >indicates that João A. Fernandes is paid 15$000 (15 Portuguese escudos) per hour

    From the linked Wikipedia article, the escudo was replaced with the Euro in 2002, at a rate of about 200 escudos to the Euro. Seems like they had quite a bit of inflation in those three or so decades.

    • tumetab12 days ago
      I was intrigued by the value so did some research.

      I would guess the 15$/hour value was chosen to approximate an average gross salary. The annualized payment would be 31200$[1] and it seems the average annual salary was around 30359$.

      Updated to 2022 values the annual gross pay would be 10033€ [3], current average annual gross salary is 20483€ [4].

      [1] 15$ * 2080 hours [2] https://www.repository.utl.pt/bitstream/10400.5/9819/1/ee-ja... [3] https://www.ine.pt/xportal/xmain?xpid=INE&xpgid=ipc&xlang=en [4] https://www.pordata.pt/pt/estatisticas/salarios-e-pensoes/sa...

    • nunobrito3 days ago
      15 escudos was roughly 7 cents of Euro in those days. You could buy one chewing gum with that kind of money. An expresso coffee would cost 50 escudos on the turn of the century.
    • ajose_mr3 days ago
      There was: https://www.inflationtool.com/rates/portugal/historical?utm_...

      I have heard a few stories about those times in the 70s and 80s where people were selling their properties and putting the money in the bank which was paying 20% interest.

      A bitter lesson on the difference between the nominal Vs real value of money rapidly ensued.

      • nodja3 days ago
        I'm portuguese and there's an oddity in either this chart or my memory.

        When we transitioned to the euro it seemed most shops straight up converted from escudo to eurocent. So if something cost 50 escudos it would cost 50 cents. I was a teen at the time so I remember having to pay double for breakfast and arcade coinop games and people blaming the inflation for the doubled price of stuff. Yet the chart doesn't represent this. I know the price of electronics for example wasn't doubled so I wasn't expect a 100% inflation rate or anything, but I still feels it should've been higher than 4%.

        • anthk3 days ago
          Ditto in Spanish with the former currency, the peseta.

          1 euro = 166 PTS, 6 euro ~ 1000 PTS, the basic banknote.

          Guess what happened. Exactly. Bread costing 100 PTS began to cost... 166, 1 euro.

          • kgwgk3 days ago
            Bread didn’t go up 66% overnight.

            It did go up 66%… but it took more than 15 years: https://dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/6407661.pdf

            • anthk3 days ago
              In some places, it did over a year.
              • kgwgk3 days ago
                In your mind :-)
                • anthk3 days ago
                  Tell that to lots of local shops there on what happened between 2002 and 2005 :)

                  And, of course, bars.

                  • kgwgk3 days ago
                    We were talking about bread. And "between 2002 and 2005" is somewhat longer than "over a year".
          • jmrm2 days ago
            It didn't happed specifically with bread, as other comment exposed, but it happened with other products, specially in bars, cafés, and restaurants.

            On the other hand, inflation affected different products in different ways. I remember how in January 1st 2002 a small bag of Ruffles Jamón costed €0.15 in a kiosk and now it's around €0.50 (or even more) in same places (and now contains less product and more air), and I doubt any other product that are nearly 300% percent inflation since 2002 (outside homes sadly)

        • xenadu023 days ago
          Uh 3 years of 22% inflation (give or take) doubles prices. When you're a young kid it sure would seem like everything got twice as expensive really fast, especially since most stores and manufacturers aren't raising prices every week to track inflation.

          If I estimate the 10-ish years of 20% +/- 3% that's around 7x which I can't imagine.

          • pedrosorio3 days ago
            They were talking about 2002 when the Euro was introduced and "it felt like" prices doubled overnight. At the time (as you can see in the chart) inflation was below 4% per year.
  • zorked3 days ago
    I didn't know they used to call computers "ordenadores" in Portugal. Interesting.
    • pedroaniceto3 days ago
      'till the 80's, french was the computer dominating language. Terms like "Octeto" (portuguese for byte) were derived from french glossary (tehy had laws to prevent the english tech term colonization and still today they have a french word for every english counterpart). So, "Ordenadores" was pretty common. And before electronics took over, we had "Electrológica", refering mixed hardware like Burroughs or Gestetner.
      • titanomachy3 days ago
        English-speaking programmers still say "octet" for byte sometimes, for example when talking about IP addresses.
        • jdblair3 days ago
          The term "octet" is used in IETF documentation (for IP addresses, for example) to be specific that the byte is 8 bits in length. Historically the size of a "byte" on a system was machine-dependent. The industry coalesced around the 8-bit byte, and differentiated it from "machine word" in the 70s and 80s.

          Edit: I just checked wikipedia, and this is described there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte

        • toast03 days ago
          Like the sibling says, octet is useful when in a networking context, because bytes weren't uniformly sized, but also because communications protocols were sometimes only 7-bit.

          Serial ports and modems often operated in that mode, and UUCP influenced mail and newsgroups to only use 7-bit data; requiring encoding for data with the high bit set. Protocols that specify octets are dealing with 8-bit bytes and don't have to deal with that.

    • forinti3 days ago
      In Brazil the vocabulary changed a lot from the 80s onward too.

      I was used to reading everything in English, so Brazilian computer books and magazines would always read strange to me. Then in the 90s everything just moved to American vocabulary.

      The strangest word I recall in this context is the use of "alça" for handle.

      • zorked3 days ago
        Brazil had a bad problem with technical books being translated by generalist translators who just looked up the word in the dictionary and used the first translation they saw. So many translations are extremely hard to read because of that.
        • rcarmo3 days ago
          Yep. The literal translation for "edge-triggered flip-flop" still stands as one of the weirdest, most bizarre things I ever read as a Continental Portuguese student.

          Never read another Brazilian technical translation ever agin.

    • madaxe_again3 days ago
      Ordinateur in French, still.
      • nsbk3 days ago
        Ordenador in Spanish, still.
    • hammock3 days ago
      Spain and France as well. Computadora was a Latin American thing
    • jgrahamc3 days ago
      They appear to have in this book, but computadores seems to have taken over.
  • pedroaniceto3 days ago
    Those were the days...
  • lubujackson3 days ago
    My dad used to work in a college lab that used punch cards. I am actually using one as a bookmark right now - they make great bookmarks!
    • toast03 days ago
      Blank, unpunched punchcards are a great size for taking notes too.
  • cafard3 days ago
    Very cool. Also good to see someone else still writing Perl.
    • jgrahamc3 days ago
      Mostly because I know it's installed, I can remember pretty much the entire language, and because I'd probably use Python instead but I've been bitten by some environment thing too many times.
      • pedroaniceto3 days ago
        Yes, a single variable notification in code, could cost THOUSANDS just because someone would punch ONE card with the new data, compile it (with no errors), save it on a cassete tape, (write the label of the tape with a new version number) and deliver it to the customer. There were no monitors. Computers would have a "BOITIER" (a rectangular box of coloured lamps) who coould have 3 meanings, ON, OFF and BLINKING. We're talking about 16 light points, and the interpretation of those lights would have the answer for the completed action. 3 whites and 3 reds would mean "No errors on compiling". But that action only verified syntax. Logic was another department :)
        • thih93 days ago
          Mind blowing. 50 years later we are putting VM in a VM in a VM to send videos of funny cats along with bank transactions across the world to everyone’s wireless pocket computer.
    • gpvos3 days ago
      It still has great whipuptitude.
  • svilen_dobrev3 days ago
    so.. those real cards that fell off .by.gravity., were the originals photographed in the textbook?
    • 3 days ago
      undefined
    • jgrahamc3 days ago
      No, they were not the originals because if you look at the book versions they do not have the printed In Es Me logo on them.
      • svilen_dobrev3 days ago
        then.. what, someone learned punching? from what's in that book? The text punched matches exactly..

        Or is that some secret "code" to open gates of XYZ?

        p.s. it is a rabbit hole :)

        • jgrahamc3 days ago
          From my blog: So, it looks like the cards were examples (perhaps from the training course) drawn from the book.