[bregma]

Generally, you'd have a deck of cards consisting of JCL, FORTRAN, and data. Your first cards were usually something like $ACCOUNT (for billing) and $JOB (for identification), the program code, then //DATA and the data. You would submit this deck through a card reader using RJE (Remote Job Entry) to either a HSJS or a GPJS (high-speed or general-purpose job streams respectively, depending on your account) on the one computer shared by the entire campus where they were batch-processed and the results sent to a high-speed line printer near your card reader. On good days this would take seconds. On the morning a first-year assignment was due there would be a lag of hours.

There was no 'compiled executable'. There was 64k of core memory and no disk for HSJS jobs. There was just you desk of cards and the resulting printout and everything else was ephemeral.