Hello! Funny you mentioned it, there are supposed to be machines like that hiding in storage back at the VCF facility. ----- Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8@gmail.com "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again." On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 10:50 PM Mike Loewen via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
On Fri, 21 May 2021, Mike Loewen via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
I joined Explorer Post 385 in State College, PA in 1969 as a 9th grader. Our emphasis was computer programming, which was fairly unusual for the time. We took programming classes from PSU grad students and area professionals, starting with FORTRAN and continuing with IBM 360 Assembler and PL/1. EP385 was sponsored by HRB Singer, and we had an account on the IBM 360/67 at Penn State. The preferred FORTRAN compiler was WATFOR (University of Waterloo FORTRAN). PSU upgraded to a 370, and we moved on to WATFIV (Waterloo FORTRAN IV). I still have some printouts from 1975 with the JCL and listings of some of my FORTRAN programs.
This was on punch cards, of course. We wrote out our programs on coding forms, then headed to the keypunch room to punch the deck on IBM 029 keypunches. You then took your deck to the dispatch area, filled out a form and submitted your deck to the dispatcher. Some time later, possibly hours depending on how busy it was, you got your deck back with the output listing. Hopefully, it ran. If not, you headed back to the keypunch to fix your error(s), lather rinse and repeat.
Mike Loewen mloewen@cpumagic.scol.pa.us Old Technology http://q7.neurotica.com/Oldtech/