Why Column Six?

I've decided to consolidate to this one blog. Instead of two seldom updated blogs I'm hoping to use this new location for more frequent postings. At least that's the plan...

I suppose the name of this blog might be of interest. The phrase Column Six comes from the ancient days of my early computer science days. Back in those dark ages of big iron, the primary means of communicating with the computer was through punched cards. Back then the Fortran programming language was the standard for us computer science nerds. Typically there would be one line of code on each card. If your line of code didn't fit in columns 7-72 it had to be continued on the next card. To indicate that a card was a continuation of the previous one, you would usually punch a "+" character in column six.

Since I see this blog as a continuation of the earlier blog postings it seemed appropriate that I use "Column Six" as the name.