sorting 3910

No, it was a cross-reference utility. I learned early on that a good cross-reference listing was not a luxury, but a necessity. I wrote a number of cross-reference utilities myself, covering such diverse areas as file and macro usage by program, file and program usage by JCL, etc.

Few enough people understood the value of a good cross-reference back then. Nowadays most people wouldn't even know what a cross-reference listing is, let alone what it's good for.

One of the luckiest "just for the hell of it" things I ever did was to take a typing clbutt in junior high. At the time it was fun to be able to get 45 wpm on a manual Underwood - but when I got into computers I suddenly realized that I had developed an invaluable skill.

That was my experience also.

Most places where I worked took it for granted that programmers didn't do their own keypunching beyond punching or correcting one or two cards. Thus there was often little access to a keypunch; not all shops kept a spare machine for such purposes. Often I'd have to sneak into the keypunch room when nobody was there, or a girl was off sick. (Heaven help anyone who disturbed a job in process just because the operator was gone for lunch!)

At one site we had one of those little column-at-a-time punches. This one, rather than having one button per row, had a single punch die which you would slide up or down to the desired row, then press the big handle to punch the hole. I suppose it was better than filing one of my teeth down to a rectangle of the proper size and shape - but not much. Out of frustration, I taped a little sign to the unit: "Programmers have priority on this punch!"

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