On 2/13/20 11:48 AM, Hittner, David T [US] (MS) wrote: > My college, DePauw University (Greencastle, IN, USA), had a DEC card > reader attached to their PDP-11/45 running RSTS/E, and later connected > it to their new VAX 11/782(!) running VMS. > > They made all intro students in 1979 learn to use the card punch > machines and submit programming jobs on cards, until they finally got > rid of the card punch/readers in favor of interactive terminals in > 1980-81. >
University College of Wales (Aberystwyth) in 1978. Those doing the 'Algol for Scientists' course had to BUY coding pads. You wrote your programs, longhand, on these, and then tore off the pages and submitted them to the typists in the coding room. A few hours later (on a good day!) a deck of cards would appear in your pigeon hole. You took this to the so-called 'cafeteria', a small room with a card reader and a line printer, and could queue up to submit your job (with a 45 second runtime limit) to the twin ICL 4130s (the card reader did seem quite reliable though!) Find the errors, correct the card(s), go round the loop again. When everything compiled correctly, submit the card deck into the queue for batch processing (i.e. a longer run time). If you were really unlucky, your compile time exceeded the 45 seconds cafeteria time. Eventually we were let loose on the terminals, which at least saved on the coding sheets. Chemistry had a single teletype for the entire department, on a good day it would run at 1200 baud, on a bad day you had to call the computer department on the main campus and ask for a 300 baud connection instead. Youth of today, etc, etc... Brian. _______________________________________________ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh