A neat 'bit' of computer etymology

Ólafur Waage, Carson Woody and Kip Heath discuss a question about a technical term.

GUESTS:

HOST: Tom Scott.
QUESTION PRODUCER: David Bodycombe.

EDITED BY: Julie Hassett at The Podcast Studios, Dublin.
GRAPHICS: Chris Hanel at Support Class. Assistant: Dillon Pentz.
FORMAT: Pad 26 Limited/Labyrinth Games Ltd.
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: David Bodycombe and Tom Scott.

[alexanderthegray]

I finally got one immediately. My 12 years of IT work has finally come in handy for lateral.

[VinnieBartilucci]

The "someone" who found the first computer bug was Grace Hopper. The term "bug" was in use for mechanical devices, but this was the first time it was used in reference to computers.
The bug is currently owned by the Smithsonian, and I was greatly disappointed that it wasn't on display when I visited many years ago.

[Phreakmatic]

The reason the delete key has the keycode 127 is literally from punch tape because it's all the holes except the parity bit

[Ciara_Turner]

It's not mentioned here but I love the connection between punch cards and knitting, it's fascinating history

[ShockMicro]

Didn't have a guess at first, but then Carson mentioned "hole-filling" and my mind immediately went to "patch".

[cannot-handle-handles]

00:42 Yeah, I'm not sure "hole filling" is really that much of a common phrase, either, at least not in computing. 😆

[tiadeets]

After I translated the question, my mum got it immediately and was like "come on!" at them. 🤣

[SmugLookingBarrel]

I love how you imply that errors being a common occurrence is a relic of the early days of computing.

[baksatibi]

It's not really relevant to the question, but the first term that came to my mind was _striping, _ which is the practice of drawing a diagonal line on the edge of the card stack. If it gets dropped and the cards get shuffled it's easy to verify if they are put back in the correct order.

[bjornsan]

As someone who doesn't know much about computers I knew this one right away. They come out with patches for games all the time.

[Yupppi]

No way you had Olafur Waage in your show!! "Someone who literally makes videos on technology" yes, yellow boxes at the dock are technology for sure, like Nordic Santas or foods.

[freewave]

It takes more cards to program solitaire than it does to play it

[mrcet]

What immediately popped into my mind was that you could effectively delete characters by hitting the “rubout” key over them. The rubout character was, in short, the “no-character character, ” meaning that it was always ignored. Rubout was all 1s, meaning that it would punch out all holes, so no matter what character you originally put in that spot on the card, you could always overwrite it with a rubout character, effectively deleting it.

Edit: After posting this I remembered that the particular system that I programmed using punchcards did not use ASCII character encoding. So, this doesn’t apply to normal ASCII computers (essentially all computers nowadays).

I took that class in 1980, and at that time it was already an out-of-date computer (although still reasonably fast for its time).

[Armadeus]

would've loved to see the clip of kip asking a question about a football match she personally watched, but this was lovely too!

[christiant.g.]

Probably the first one I've gotten instantly without knowing beforehand, very satisfying :)

[greensteve]

Oooh! Finally one that I already knew!

[sorrynotsorry]

Just as a little adjacent note, the most common versioning structure is called SemVer (semantic versioning) which uses three integers with period delimiters (eg. 1.0.0). The last integer is the patch version. (The other two being Major and Minor).

[peterfireflylund]

Dropping the cards on the floor was not a big problem. People would take their stack of cards and draw diagonal lines on the side of the stack. Jus a single one if the stack was small. A long one (from top to bottom) + a lot of shorter ones if it were a big stack. The long one would give the rough order of the cards, the short ones would allow for local ordering. Quick and easy.

[specific_protagonist]

The bug thing is a folk etymology - the photograph of a 🐛 in the computer was amusing because it was a literal bug and the meaning of "mistake" already existed.

[Animaniac-vdst]

Love how Olafur is explaining just a little more than absolutely necessary to understand the basic concept.
Just those 15 seconds of extra information for the interested without boring those who are not.

I would probably have to be stopped after several minutes of introduction into a 20 minute explanation that basically nobody asked for.