http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=1036540


in reply to Turing's Cathedral

Never did that to a roll of paper-tape, but I do belong to the “dropped an entire box of punched cards” club, and I remember what good confetti all those “holes” made at office parties . . .

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Re^2: Turing's Cathedral
by jmlynesjr (Deacon) on Jun 03, 2013 at 18:02 UTC

    Did the card drop trick too! You can never get all of that card chad out of the carpet. :)

    James

    There's never enough time to do it right, but always enough time to do it over...

[reply]

      jmlynesjr:

      I've always wondered why it was called "chad". At our school, we called them "withers". (Simply because I rescued a large manila envelope from the trash can of a teacher--Mr. Withers--and used it to hold all the paper tape waste. Since the manila envelope had his name on it, we named them withers.)

      I don't remember what happened to the envelope, it was probably just tossed, but I intended to use it as confetti on the last day of school or some such. (I'm really not certain why I was keeping them...)

      </good-ole-days-mode>

      ...roboticus

      When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.

[reply]

        Seems that there is no clear origin of the word "chad". See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chad_%28paper%29.

        In about 1972 a female friend that was working for IBM in Atlanta at the time, dumped about 10 lbs of the stuff at a party. It was still being cleaned up years later.

        James

        There's never enough time to do it right, but always enough time to do it over...

[reply]

In Section Meditations