Pete Birkinshaw from Manchester, UK - Used Punchcard

The date was some time in 1975.

The place was the Virginia Tech computer lab.

It was three in the morning and the small room was crowded with undergraduate and graduate students all the way to the PhD level.

A stack of punched cards 9 inches high or higher was in my hand, each with one statement of code. After waiting in line for my turn, I inserted them into the feeder for the giant computer. Within a few minutes the printer sends out pages and pages and pages of repeated text:

—- error — error — error —-

It would not even read my name.

Somewhere, along the line, early on, I had made a syntax mistake or some other kind of error.

One error cause a cascade of misinformation and a compounding error. The main frame computer just could not get past it.

The computer was unforgiving … and even into the days of DOS and, to some extent, even today, requiring precise language

Thank goodness Google has become intuitive and often knows what I mean.

Truth and precision seem to matter in the mathematical realm.

It sure makes me appreciate grace.

There was no grace built into Fortran or Cobol.

However, it exits in abundance in the fabric of God's spiritual universe. 

At the same time, God loves and embodies truth and has also built in a passion for precision which the psalmist celebrated.

Whether art, science, ethics, morality, doctrine, or scholarship … or driving a car, details and diligent attention to the fine print can make a very big difference.

It can deepen our worship or make all the difference in our success or failure.

The scripture commends it to our attention.

" You have commanded your precepts
to be kept diligently." – Psalm 119:4 (ESV)

It is not the devil who is in the details, but God. It is in the fine-tuning of God's perfection that we discover beauty and wonder along with God's best for our own lives.

A very good sermon on the topic:

Some interesting history on punch cards: