Was the computer center in Yorkshire?
A certain contingent of us got into the habit of working on our programs at night, in the lobby of the computer center. Usage was typically light (except towards the end of the quarter), and we could submit our decks, even coded to run at Idle Priority (to make our time allocations go farther) and get our printouts in just a few minutes. We could get many runs each night.
Those were the days when one carefully “desk checked” every program as thoroughly as possible before submitting it. And with every run, one got a full printout of your entire program source code. Editing was done by examining and marking up that, followed by a trip to the nearby keypunch room.
This was ultimately followed up, at least in one quarter, by an hour in my 07:00 a.m. Computer Science class, which I invariably slept through, and then flunked.
ETA: And that’s why a tape player is called a “deck”.
More ETA: @Exapno_Mapcase : What they called “Data Processing” was distinct from anything that you would call actual “Computer Science”. It more meant dull boring Inventory Management or Payroll applications written in COBOL or, better still, think of dealing with data using RPG.
I’m looking forward to 3d storage media . . . so we can all have personal holodecks.
A set of punch cards was always a deck. Heck what do you call it if you are playing a card game?
The picture of the deck of punch cards above brings back memories. One learnt quickly to draw a diagonal line across the top of a deck. It made reassembling it very easy if you dropped it.
As someone from the golden era of HiFi, a “record deck” was very much the term for a turntable. It even made into the name of one of the more well known high end turntables - the Linn Sondek. (Linn made a point of having a “k” in every product’s name. Even their foray into computers was called the Rekursiv.)
In the IBM mainframe world the term “deck” persisted long after physical punchcards. To run a program you had to describe what you wanted to run and which files it required etc. in JCL (Job Control Language) which was still formatted in lines of 72+8 characters which harked back to the 80 column punch cards. The JCL file you submitted would be called a JCL deck.
I suggest, purely as a matter of speculation, that there may be an intermediary sense here. In a theatrical space, the stage area — the wide flat area where the performers appear — is called the “deck.” This is indeed taken directly from nautical terminology, given that the flat wooden floor would be constructed similarly, and also because it was common to have sailors hanging around as their knowledge of ship’s rigging was useful and transferable knowledge backstage. So given that recording engineers would frequently be capturing live performances in such settings, it’s possible that “deck as flat working space” is taken more from the stage sense of the word versus the maritime tradition. I have no cite, but it feels evolutionarily more plausible to me than the idea that anyone would look at a reel-to-reel recorder and think “ship.”
I know this is off topic but I couldn’t let it pass:
Before “boomer times” we had to book time days ahead on the computer. It might be at 3 am, but hard luck. You ran your program and got a wad of fanfold printouts that might take you days to analyse.
While the origin of the word “deck” might indeed be traced back to referring to a flat surface, it has another important connotation among audiophiles, namely that it denotes a component of a hi-fi or stereo system rather than a complete system in itself. Thus a tape recorder is a self-contained device, but a tape deck is a component that produces line-level signals suitable for input into a separate amplifier and speakers.
Being bored, I looked deck up in the OED.
So, the origin is interesting. The first uses seem to be as a covering. Cited in 1466. A bed covering or horsecloth. Deck refers to the fabric item.
Then in nautical terms the deck covered part of a boat. Possibly simply a tarpaulin. It was later that it came to be sufficiently solid to be something that could be walked upon. Such uses noted in nautical terms in 1550. It then became both the cover of the hull and something to be walked upon. Prisoners were kept below decks. Multiple decks became part of the ship.
First use as a tape recorder cited in 1949. It is the surface above which the tape moves, together with its attachments (motors, heads, head amplifiers) built as a single unit. As noted above, it only refers to the subsystem that necessarily handles the tape. The deck isn’t in and of itself a functioning tape recorder.
One might also note uses such as “hit the deck”, “decking someone”, or hard landings “hitting the deck” even when it is terra firma that is being referenced.
It’s a verb, too: at least in Britain people probably know “Nos Galan” with the words “Deck the hall with boughs of holly / …”
ESPECIALLY English! Where “th” can represent two different sounds (thy thigh), to name but one example.
Seems to be true, but I just never heard it. And I’m not exactly a young whippersnapper. In 1983 my then-wife worked at a high-end audio shop and I never heard anything but “turntable.” We had a Linn Sondek.
The really cool ones had tape that would self-destruct in 5 seconds.
Probably etymologically linked to “tick”, which is still used for a mattress cover (though the word is now somewhat archaic, because the item itself is archaic).
“Bedecked” is the fossil adjective describing something which has been decked, when “decked” was roughly synonymous with “draped”.
There’s also “decked out”, often used for someone wearing fancy attire.
And similarly, the paved area surrounding a swimming pool is called the deck.
And recall, even with cassettes, the earliest players tended to be horizontal with a pop-up lid, not vertical. Even with reel-to-reel, the horizontal configuration was as common (more common?) originally as the vertical.
Language changes over time…
"Don we now our gay apparel…"♫
And many Jewish weddings still feature a badeken:
My late father’s 1974 TEAC A-360S cassette deck was like this. It was funny, too, because he had it mounted upright into the face panel of the component cabinet and from then on, he’d have to catch the casette after pushing the eject button.