[hhyndman]

While studying Comp Sci at University of Toronto in the early 70s, I recall the 360/20 was used as a node to connect suburban colleges (Erindale and Scarborough) to the "mainframe", which was a 360/65 (I believe).

We would iterate from the keypunch room, to the 360/20's card reader, and wait for the mainframe to process our code and transmit the code output to the local printer, for review at tables large enough to page through fan-fold paper, to check and mark-up the code. Back then, we didn't need watches to remind us to stand up and walk around every 30 minutes -- the coding workflow forced us to!

Reading the Principles of Operations for the 360/20, the processor was supported half-word (16 bit), and had no floating point, but support packed decimal numbers. Our machine had 16K.

It was great to see the article -- made me reminisce about the days of me carrying boxes of punch cards and inches of output back and forth to my residence.