[MrCoffee7]

Mainframes in the early 1980s allowed people to access computer power via interactive terminals instead of sitting at a keypunch machine creating large decks of punched cards to take over to a card reader machine. This was before personal computers were widely available at an affordable price, so office workers did not have a personal PC sitting at their cubicle at that point. The computer monitors at that point were not full color displays - they just had bright green text against a black screen. The language used on the mainframe was COBOL. If your computer job required tapes, there would be a short wait for someone to manually mount the correct tapes needed. You would need to manually go to a room near the computer to sort through printouts to pick up your specific printout of your job yourself, where the job was printed on wide sheets of white and green paper in a font that looked like something from a high-speed dot matrix quality printer. Your printout stack might have been especially heavy and thick if your program terminated abnormally with an ABEND type of error and a sysdump printed out. For references, see the books "Mainframes, Computing on Big Iron" by Patrick Stakem and "IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems" by Emerson W. Pugh.