Welcome to...DrumCard
Welcome to...Why DrumCard? It goes back to the beginings of my association with computers. (Back to the the dark ages, circa 1969). In those days a mere student was given no disk storage space so your programs were entered each time they ran. To enter a program you used a device known as a key punch to create a series of Hollerith Punch Card (aka punch or computer cards for short). Each card had a single command on it. This "deck" of cards was then taken to the card reader and, along with some system control cards, read into the computer for execution.
My first language was Fortran (still available today) which was "field sensitive. The line numbers, commands, continuation characters, and sequence numbers all fell within 80 characters (I bet you wondered why the magic number appeared occasionally in contemporary computing). The drum card allowed you to control how the cards were fed under the punch station on the key punch. You could cause the cards to pause at the correct column to start the next field. The tab key skipped to the next field and, if you were really into it, you could it duplicate fields from previous cards. I became quite adept at using the drum card when entering programs after about 4 years of use.
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