"We would put each of our program's instructions onto a punch card until we had a "deck" that was the whole thing. Then, we'd pass it through to the IT priests who would run the program and give us a printout of the results the next day. We'd fix the bugs, lather, rinse repeat.."
Same here. But we didn't have priests. With 300 students, that wasn't practical. What we did have was a card reader with a 300 baud modem to the Amdahl 460 at main campus. Ah, the joys of stacking your deck and listening to the reader, bump, bump, bump, pause..., bump,bump,bump. One day, in mid-semester, we ran out of punch cards. So that weekend, some guys drove down to College Station and went into the computer lab with a handtruck and started loading up boxes of cards. They filled the back of their van and drove back. No one even questioned them.
We always wondered if we had some overalls made up with "Amdahl Field Service" stenciled on the back, whether or not we could make off with the whole machine. "Yeah, we got a service call. From the looks of it, we have to take it back to the shop."... |
