From Power Looms to Punch Cards

Information technology and computers have changed the world. As I have described in the previous two articles in this series, the foundations of these changes occured during dangerous times - World War II and the Cold War.  The Information Age itself brings new dangers. This article begins to describe why and I hope that the average lay person will take the time to absorb the slightly technical information here. I believe that your patience will have its rewards. Please note that certain industry-specific terms are in this color.

Many of us know that punch cards are associated with early computers. In fact, punch cards got their start in the textile industry during the 19th century as they were used to program power looms - also called Jacquard Looms for weaving patterns.  Music is also a pattern and player piano rolls worked in a similar fashion.

Think of a light switch - the common kind that toggles on or off. The fact that the switch can be in just two positions gives rise to the term binary.  The strategy of making use of that very basic process is called boolean logic.  It would be simplistic but adequate to called boolean logic the logic of "on or off", or "either this or that". If you had a duplex switch plate - two switches, four different states can be defined:
  1. Both off
  2. Both on
  3. Left on, right off
  4. Left off, right on

It's beginning to sound like an activist chant! 

If we add a third switch, the possibilities double to 8, and if you install a wiring scheme in your house that has a switch plate with 8 switches, there's going to be 256 possibilities. That's a lot to keep track of. Wouldn't it be efficient to get a bunch of cards that have holes punched in them so that if you were to force a card down on the switch plate, you would have the desired settings? This is now a metaphor for how instructions are sent to the computer's CPU and it is in reality how it was done in the early days of computing. That switch plate is a metaphor for what is referred to as a 'byte'. Those instructions that are now fed to the CPU by a programming language are composed of bytes.

As time went by, procedures developed so that whole decks of cards would be applied at one time as a program.  It turned that when a program (or deck of cards) was assembled there was likely to be more cards than might really need to be used. The selection of which card to use was based on boolean (either/or) logic. That logic still prevails and the increasing number of cards which may or may not be used is a factor of what we call data abstraction. No doubt there were times in which cards might be inserted maliciously. Today we might call that a back door.
 

The invention of programming languages began to aid and eventually replace punch cards. The use of programming languages meant that the computer specialists could type instructions directly into the computer or type a series of instructions which were then fed en masse to the machine. Whereas a set of instructions in any programming language became the equivalent of a stack of cards - not all of which might be used - the process of data abstraction continued to increase.

The development of programming languages made the progamming and maintenance of computers much more efficient. And also much more critical. When we speak in a syntax that is not entirely what we intend, the human brain (still the most powerful computer in the known universe) has the ability to infer.  Computers don't infer and CPUs don't guess. The difference of one character of computer code could be like the difference between turning the radio switch and the wiper switch in your car.

Such differences can cause errors in the way that a computer works.  Today we call such errors bugs. The term was first used by Admiral Grace Hopper, who invented the COBOL programming language. Ms. Hopper diagnosed a problem with a computer under her supervision which was caused by a moth in the machinery - thus the term "bug". Never mind that a moth is not a bug. Programming languages are used to create computer programs. No longer do we insert a stack of cards and options of what is really sent to the CPU continues to increase.  

The major computer program on every computer is called an Operating System. A bug in the Windows Operating System that has been seen by just about anyone is announced by the dreaded "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" message.
 

Such malfunctions of an operating system can have unexpected consequences.  One case in point: In 1996 my brother had a neighbor who had a very nice and very talented wife. This fellow's wife was clever enough to earn a degree in education and responsible enough to get a job teaching. Furthermore, she was nice enough to bring home the bacon while her husband did what he did best.  Stay home and stay stoned. Let's call him "Stoney".

One day Stoney got on his son's computer and starting poking around. Sure enough, eventually he saw the "Illegal Operation" message. Misunderstanding the nature of the message, thinking perhaps that law enforcement had infiltrated the computer and smelled the pot he had just inhaled, Stony panicked and flushed his entire stash of weed right down the toilet.
 

About the same time in another part of the country, another malfunction occured. As you may recall from an earlier article, computers were extensively used from early on in the telephone industry. As programming languages used on these computers became more complex, the process of data abstraction became more profound. In other words, a computer program or operating system dedicated to phone line switching might have millions of lines of code and some of those lines might be read (or executed) by the computer very rarely.  It is the job in the programming discipline to test (or execute) every line of code as it is being developed.

Results and adherence to this procedure vary. In 1996, a line of code involved with phone transmission was executed, perhaps for the first time.  That line of code had a flaw or a "bug". It was not terminated with a semi-colon, which was one of the syntax rules of the particular language that was used to write the program.
 
 A series of cascading failures was set in motion. On that day, because of that one bad line of code, most phone transmissions in the United States failed. By the time the problem was corrected, it is estimated that over a billion dollars of productivity was lost to the economy. 
 

This "no stone unturned" process is not unique to computer programming. In 1992, I was part of a construction survey near Palmer, Alaska. This project was to correct problems resulting from an earlier survey by another organization.

Engineers planning the construction of a bridge over a canyon had plotted from data collected from previous surveys that the center line of the bridge was off by 50 feet from what was planned. The remedial survey began at the same survey point from which the original survey began. I placed a survey instrument over the point, which was a piece of rebar driven several feet into the ground. The "point" was next to a farmer's field. I dug around in the dirt around the rebar. I could see that the rebar had been bent a few inches below ground level - presumably struck by a plow. I "plumbed"  or focused the survey instrument at the bend in the rebar, rather than at the top. Subsequently, we had a successful survey.
 
The level of precision demanded from either surveying or computer programming can have widespread effects when not followed. Fortunately for the phone industry, such outages such as I describe above are less frequent. One of the reasons is that the phone industry began to make more and more use of the internet protocol of "routing"  and "hops" such as I described in the previous article.
 

If necessary, refer to the end of the previous article.

Next : SCADA on Thin Ice