bwana Loc: Bergen, Alberta, Canada

I well remember punch cards. I used an early IBM computer and punch cards in the computing for my M.Sc. degree. The going prank was to shuttle a person's deck of cards and when you have several thousand cards it was not an easy task to get them back in the proper order.

bwa

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

There were at least two strategies for resorting a deck of cards

(1) the last 8 columns of the cards were punched (and printed) with an index number. It could be alphameric if your deck was really large.

(2) a sharpie could be used to draw a diagonal line on the edge of the deck. Different patterns and/or colors could be used for large decks. (Yes, they had sharpies in antiquity, but they were called something else then).

(2) was laborious hand work. Some more experienced among us could probably come up with other methods. I think the largest deck I ever had was about 2 boxes.

As far as pranks go, when computers got to do multitasking and you had a room full of teletypes, you would find someone's teletype number and send them an obscure error message.

therwol Loc: USA

I suppose we're getting off topic here, and I hope that the OP got the information they requested earlier.

One hack with punch cards was to go to the keypunch rooms late at night and empty the trays under the machines that contained the "chips" that were punched out of the cards. Once you got a large quantity, you'd get into someone's dorm room and spread them all over the place, on and in their furniture, clothing, bed etc. It would be a very difficult clean up.

I took a programming course as a freshman in college and watched as paper from a line printer was spewing out of it. Some "hacker" student had put the command to skip a page in a loop in a stack of cards. The grad student operator became livid and yelled at everyone waiting for their printouts.

The transition to time sharing and programming into terminals was taking place during my college years. You would get CPU seconds to run your programs, and you might have to ask for more if you ran out.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

If you REALLY wanted to upset the printer operator, you generate a bunch of lines of random characters (or maybe a full line of underscores). After one line you send a carriage return but no line feed. After you do that a couple hundred times, THEN you start adding page feeds. By the time you print a lot of characters all on one line, you have cut through the paper. Then the page feeds jam up the printer.