Delta 400-Wow!

[gzhuang]

Ilford is the undisputed king of B&W film. Expired stuff holds up well over time. The rest are just pretenders.

 

[Ricardo Miranda]

Ilford is the undisputed king of B&W film. Expired stuff holds up well over time. The rest are just pretenders.

And there's no reason to use expired film when the factory is still producing fresh stock and long dated to about 5 years shelf life for most of their films.
If you can't use a roll in those 5 years...

 

[Richard S. (rich815)]

And there's no reason to use expired film when the factory is still producing fresh stock and long dated to about 5 years shelf life for most of their films.
If you can't use a roll in those 5 years...

Unless you can get it much cheaper and it shoots fine.

 

[RobC]

Does any one remember IBM Fortran coding pads. Punch machines were in constant use and one had to do their coding first and then transfer this to cards.

Fortran still exists. The language is being constantly upgraded. There is now an OO (object orientated) version available. Same for COBOL.

The original design of the ADA language for a simple easily coded language. The original language contained fewer key words than C. Then the US government got ahold if it. Specifically the three branches of the military. Each of which insisted on the inclusion of their favorite "features." The result was a bloated monstrosity that only the government could love. Commercial firms avoided it if they possible could. Even NASA avoided it preferring C for their programs.

Not Fortran but when I was at college we had to hand code onto coding pads in various languages which were then sent to punch room. They didn't do verify punch so we had to visually check returned card deck for errors. We were only allowed 3 compiles per program before program it was marked! First run invariably contained syntax and/or punch errors so that gave you 2 compiles get a fully working program doing what it was supposed to do. That was pressure becasue if you failed a test you got 1 more run and if that didn't work you got kicked off the course.

 

[ME Super]

A guy I used to work with tells a story about how he was handed a deck of punch cards along with his program listing. The keypunch operator told him "I corrected your spelling." All his variable names were Spanish swear words. He had no idea the keypunch operator knew Spanish!

I don't quite go back to the punch card era, but did work with IBM mainframes for several years. To this day, people who work with those machines still call an 80-character record a card.