Just to clarify what I mentioned in my previous rant, there are several of you who are old enough to have been in the IBM punch card game but I don’t think any of you actually developed computer programs in that time. So I will explain what was involved. Back then you couldn’t just log on your computer and access a programming site and type in your program. No IBM was the system and to run a program you had to go to the computer center and using IBM punch cards , which we had to buy but weren’t expensive maybe $5 for a hundred or so, and they were stiff and probably stacked up as maybe 50 to 70 for an inch. You put them in the punch machine and then on a keyboard you typed out a card for every line in your program.

As an aside, in my senior year we had a stand alone computer that I had access to because I was being paid as a computer assistant to help students with questions and I could type the program directly into the computer without punch cards.

Now with punch cards think hanging chads. The point of this rant is that once for a reason I don’t recall we had to develop a program in FORTRAN and they had to develop the same program in COBOL and my stack was about an inch high and theirs was about six inches. It was and still is a stupid computer language.

This is like when I told you that the National Archives is looking for people who could read and write cursive. With a DOGE update you could probably eliminate 75% or more of federal IT positions.