[scioto]

I also remember working with punch cards as a non-CS engineering major doing FORTRAN. Then in the middle of the course I discovered the timeshare terminals for another mainframe that had a link to the IBM 360 on which we submitted our jobs. All you had to do was create card images in the text files, including your computer money cards (worth their weight in gold) starting at column 7, etc., and then submit the job without having to wait in line at the card reader.

It was wonderful! No carrying around a card deck held together with multiple rubber bands. Of course Someone Official found out we were doing this, so for our last lab I had to punch cards out again.

Other tricks included submitting jobs to the 360 at the other campus, which took less money from your account, but was a little slower.