The First Program
Concurrently with the proofreading I ran the deck through a special
program designed by my programmer, Mr. George Rompot. This clever
program checked the data for "illegal" characters, other "illegal"
combinations of key-strikes, and sequence. It was easy to tell the computer
what keys were "legal" in our punching, and to direct the machine to locate
all those key-strikes which were of non-allowable characters. Though this
program cannot find other spelling errors, it is a back-up for the oral
proofreading. Further, we could tell the computer which combinations of
key-strikes were not legal (e.g. consecutive blank spaces, blank spaces on
either side of a hyphen, blank spaces at the beginning of a line, consecutive
q's, capital letters within a word [except in hyphenated
compounds], and so on), and the machine would list for us all occurrences
of these. Finally, since most texts will have some consecutive numbering
of words, lines, or pages, and since this 'consecutive
numbering' information will most likely be fed into the computer along with
the initial input of raw data, it is a simple thing to have the machine check
for correct 'sequence' (i.e. whether the line numbering is correct). Since
the deck I worked with had lines numbered consecutively from 1 to over
32,240, it was easy to locate errors in line numbering in the deck of cards.
I think I can safely say that there will be no errors in this area in the final
concordance. And the time saved by not having to proofread all those
numbers was great.
