Mark Hull, aka Hulles, has been programming for a lot of years. He used to be able to smoke Camel straights at his desk, remembers big IBM mainframes, knows what DASD stands for, and was happy when the IBM 029 keypunch machine was replaced by the 129 (because it was cooler).
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Yes, he sometimes had to keypunch his own deck of 80-column cards, even though keypunching was for girls, because he didn’t effing want to wait to compile his program.
And DASD was pronounced “dazz-dee”, and stands for Direct Access Storage Device, i.e. a disk drive (vs. a tape drive, accessed sequentially). The massive DASD units were very sensitive and expensive, which is why we only smoked in the computer room when the bosses were gone.
And how did IBM know they’d produce a 129 model, when they introduced the 029 model? Because if they didn’t the leading zero on the 029 would be superfluous, right? Boy, those IBM guys were smart.