Re: And how do you show a space
Yep. ICL-ers used an upside-down triangle for the same thing.
I was taught to slash letter O to make it look greek and distinguish it from number 0, but stylistically I preferred to slash number 0s.
There was always a five line cover on my coding sheet stacks to show which conventions I was using to tell 0/O I/1 Z/2 G/9 or G/6. To this day I slash zeroes and Zs and put really long tails on Gs. Looks ugly, but I wrote so many coding sheets it sorta stuck.
Of course, the main advantage for a young male programmer to having a punch pool onsite was that the staff were universally female and for the most part young - this was the sort of job most people would even in those days regard as short-term.
Whenever the ranting of a PHB was getting one down, a quick trip across the punch room to "remind the operators to wrote protect a tape" was always a welcome distraction.
Of course, the corollary of the "most part young" is that the senior staff were for the most part older and best described as of the "battleaxe" persuasion. The trick was to take one's constitutional during the Managerial tea break.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
