At 11:46 AM 3/02/2000 +1100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>At UNSW (1976) we used Monash Uni FORTRAN on mark-sense cards which couldn't
>read anything on Fridays (clogged with dirt) and read your fingerprints on
>Mondays (after a clean). Wednesdays were good.
UNSW 1972 we used Waterloo Uni (Canada) FORTRAN (WatFor, later WatFiv),
on optical mark-sense cards. I noticed the marks lined up with every second
column of normal 80 col punchcards & devised a way of using IBM keypunch
machines to type in punch-holes (using overpunch & list of codes) which
could then be read in by the optical 40 col card readers.
This brilliant technique avoided buying blank optical cards & filling them in
with a soft pencil. It was about as reliable as using the real optical cards,
i.e. about 80% read correctly, as long as operator followed instructions
to insert cards back to front, so blank side faced sensors.
Tiring of this I got a friend to run my Fortran jobs on real 80 col punchcards
on the Chemistry dept's trusty steam powered IBM 1620 (Duchess),
where the operator had a wind up alarm clock (really !) sitting on the
console, & manually killed jobs which exceeded their allocated time,
say 5 mins for small job, 10 mins for medium, 30 mins for serious stuff.
>
> the results from the Control Data system at least a week later from
>UNSW !!
>You must've asked the wrong person. I managed to get a half day turnaround
>from the CDC Cyber on FORTRAN card decks, but then again, we submitted them
>locally using the PDP-11 batch stations. The batch stations ran Unix which
>was considered even then to be "Ace" compared to Kronos. The Unixen spooled
>all the card jobs and Cyber just polled the queue (when it wasn't
>thrashing). Had to go through Cyber because there wasn't a FORTRAN compiler
>on the PDP-11s.
>Elec Eng taught Pascal in 1976, and that was on Unix. The Unix OS was
>(mostly) stable then, and was absolutely luxurious compared to Control
>Data's offerings.
In 73 we learnt Algol-W (Stanford Uni) on IBM/360 OS/360, also APL.
Algol-W was excellent, and APL was a great idea in between crashes.
APL used "terminals" which were kind of "card-less input devices"
which were souped-up IBM golfball typewriters.
Later the Cyber with Pascal. A fun period.
Between Cyber hardware failures, early unix flaky software crashes (PDP's),
backup failures, restore failures, network failures, file system failures,
yesterdays files back again, etc etc. But best of all,
the Kleinschmidt terminal - a hard copy typewrite style terminal,
which used the intersection of 2 chunks of rotating metal to hit the paper,
generally shredding it to a pulp, but occassionaly leaving illegible smudges
on it. 20 of these in a small room sounded like a nest of machine guns.
"Glass terminals" came a bit later on.
This is kind of Off Topic but they started it first 8-)
>
>Cheers,
>
>Jill.
>
>___________________________________________
>Jill Rowling
>Senior Design Engineer & Unix System Administrator
>Electronic Engineering Department, Aristocrat Leisure Industries
>3rd Floor, 77 Dunning Ave Rosebery NSW 2018
>Phone: (02) 9697-4484 Fax: (02) 9663-1412
>Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
----------------------------------------------
Brian Martin, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Future Software Pty Ltd, Sydney, Australia.
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