Joshua Paul Cane

Book cover: Automatic Data Processing: Principles and Procedures.

Update: I will continue Coding related posts and articles on my other site.

A colleague handed me a book that belongs to his father: Automatic Data Processing: Principles and Procedures by Elias Awad. It’s about data management circa 1966.

Fascinated, I borrowed the book and made some scans. It begins with an overview of historic data processing like Roman figure counting, Venetian bookkeeping and Pascal’s calculator. The majority of the book describes data theory and the modern methods of programming and processing data. The appendix covers Fortran and COBOL among others.

What interested me the most was the chapters on punched cards — the two leading card types (Hollerith/IBM and Powers/Remington Rand), how they’re written, read, sorted and duplicated. I can imagine the game of 52-card pickup was not considered very fun in those days.

Awad provides illustrations and photographs such as those below.

An example of a punched card.

A photograph of an IBM control drum.

A photograph of a Univac optical scanning punch.

Portion of a COBOL program sheet.

I attended the Richmond Java Users Group (RJUG) held in the Innsbruck area. I occasionally attend these just to see what’s going on. I know Randy, but that’s it. I really have no idea why I attend. I would like to be a Java developer, I suppose.

As usual, there are two concurrent events and both are appealing. Rivaling RJUG is Writers Wednesday downtown. I don’t recall what the specifics of that event were, but I do remember being interested. However, I always choose the writing group over the RJUG sessions, so now it was time for technology to trump literature.

Jared Richardson was the speaker and I anticipated that once I finished my pizza and Coca Cola, I’d shortly leave. The subject was more career oriented than Java coding so that was good. Still how broad would the material be?

I decided to stick through it and I’m glad I did. Mr. Richardson was an engaging speaker and he spoke about getting your name out. This could be done through blogging, speaking, teaching and writing. All good tips, if but common sensical.

My problem is not knowing what to do, but actually doing it. He made the important point of setting concrete goals both long term and short. Short being daily goals, not letting time go to waste. I do that too much.

I would like to teach. I would like to blog. I would like to write. But what insight can I provide? What can I say or write that hasn’t been written over and over already? Perhaps these voices that dash my ideas before I can reach a keyboard or pen need to be duct-taped.

Tonight I am going to write this blog entry. Let’s see how far it goes.