| In the Fall months of 1984 and the early months of 1985, I was in a tech school area of study that required us to punch the input source code for mainframe COBOL and Assembler programs. We also had a Prime mini in the lab with monochrome terminals. We used BASIC on the Prime as kind of an intro language, but they were pretty strict about learning about punched cards because some businesses in the area were still using them. We would punch up a program along with a few Job Control cards and we'd place them in trays in the computer lab. About once every ten or fifteen minutes, a computer operator would stop into the lab. They'd gather the rubber-banded decks of cards. Then, they'd submit them for compile/execution. They would also deliver output printed on greenbar paper from the prior run. The instructors would grade on what should be a "clean" greenbar listing ( good compile and no runtime errors. ) They could still catch logic problems and such by reading the code, though. When the card decks were left alone in the trays, some of the jokers I went to school with would punch up COBOL and/or Assembler comment cards with crude jokes on them and they'd insert them in peoples' decks to see if the instructors caught eye on them when grading the greenbar listing. Something like: * HEY, PROFESSOR SMITH.. YOU'RE CUTE!
When the system got busy ... like during finals ... you might only be able to get one compile/run in per day.Using the keypunch machines was difficult. The print mechanisms didn't always work on the ones we had, so you couldn't always see what you were typing. One of the students did have an unusually large program punched on cards and they dropped the deck in the hallway. They didn't have sequence numbers punched on the right edge so sorters couldn't be used. A group of us each took some pages of the last printed greenbar listing and a pile of the cards and we'd put together what we could ... trading the cards out to others like we were each solving little puzzles. I'm pretty sure that we got the program back together. Not only did many of us have 8-bit micros at home where we could dash off programs in BASIC quickly, all of us were required to take BASIC on the Prime minicomputer ... so everyone knew that there was a better way. At the end of that first year, we got to use 3270-ish monochrome terminals which were much better. We could submit our jobs directly then, but we still had to wait for the greenbar delivery to find out the fate of our compile/run for batch jobs. |
Maybe they hadn't learned that the first thing to do when you've just punched a large deck is to take a fat marker and draw a line diagonally across the top of all the cards. Helps hugely if you ever get them scrambled and need to sort.