2013-07-18 Today, after a hint by Kai Naumann, I've visited the ``Computer- museum der Fakultaet Informatik'' at Stuttgart University. [0] I had a bunch of punch cards with me. I've bought them in the be- lieve that their contents would be trivial and boring. Then it appeared to be interesting. Some had the contents printed (human readable) on them, some not. I wanted to have the contents machine readable (i.e. for modern machines, because punch cards are machine readable of course) to be able to work with it. Hence, I needed a punch card reader. They're hard to find these days. But at the computer museum they have one and they use it. Actually, they need to use it from time to time to keep it work- ing. Reading those cards and transmitting the data over some handmade link to a kermit-running Unix machine was what I came for, but some really fine hours with Christian and Klemens was what I got as well. They know that old hardware and software mean. They run the hardware from the times I am interested in. Yes, they booted the PDP-11 for me and I sat there at the (video) terminal and browsed through the system. Next time I'll get there, I'll sit at the hardcopy terminal and experience what it really feels to be working with one of them. Then I do have to work with ed, because vi simply won't be of any use. Now that I have the text file with the punch card contents, I still have to analyze it. [0] http://computermuseum.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/ http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke