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Left Justification of Punch Cards




I hesitate to tell punch card stories as
a deluge may follow. However, a couple
of you commented on left padding that
made my e-mails hard to read.

My original was written in XyWrite, then
converted through WordPort to ASCII and
saved on desktop. In that form it would
accept a Windows copy command, so I put
it in Eudora to send it. The padding was
caused by space on the left side of the
XyWrite message. I think I've got the
XyWrite fixed now. If you have  no
interest in the Archives of Ancient
Research, just treat this as a test msg
on left-justification.

The late Don Stokes was a real pioneer
in the use of sophisticated methodology
in political science. He once had very
large data set, all on punch cards. At
the time, MIT was the only place with
computers large enough  to  do  the
analysis. So Don flew from Ann Arbor to
Cambridge carrying his data set with
him. As he entered the computer room at
MIT, the swinging door banged into his
elbow, and his punch cards fell all over
the floor. There was nothing for it but
to gather up all the cards and fly back
to Ann Arbor.

John


John H. Kessel
Ohio State University
kessel.1@xxxxxxxx