This school year (2021-22), I am marking the 40th anniversary of my freshman year in undergrad. And right now, I am marking the approximate 40th anniversary of a very funny story regarding one of my classes.
This story is a bit complicated. Those of you who haven't read yesterday's background story should probably
go read it here unless you're familiar with old-time "Big Iron" computer equipment (including punch cards, keypunches, et cetera) and the culture which grew up around it.
One of my activities in college was WCWM, the college radio station (89.1 FM back then, then it switched to 90.7, now it's 90.9, long unrelated story). And one of the folks I knew at the station was Marc, a computer science and psych double major. He was a senior in my freshman year. His senior project for Comp. Sci. was to write a full-screen editor for the new PR1ME system, which had *NO* full-screen editors available for it then. Marc's project was the very first one ever available on PR1MEs. It was called the Structured All-purpose Novice Editor, or SANE for short. Marc asked me to help beta-test it starting right after Spring Break, while I was taking FORTRAN (CompSci I).
Now the FORTRAN class still used punch cards, as did most of the computer classes back then (the PR1ME was new). And the keypunch machines were limited in number (you had to sign up for time slots to use them), clunky to use, and often malfunctioned. One might well be excused for thinking there had to be a better way.
Somewhere around late February, the computer center received and installed a HASP emulator which could connect the PR1ME to the IBM. You just sent a text file from the PR1ME to the IBM, and the IBM would process it as if the file were a deck of punch cards. Well, all us geeks who had term papers to write figured out pretty quickly that you could take a ready-to-print term paper, put the correct lines of JCL (Job Control Language) at the beginning and the end, and lo and behold you could print out your term paper on the dot-matrix printer... on 8.5"x11" white paper! (The reactions of the professors to THAT are a different story.)
I quickly figured out, y'know, if we can send term papers to that printer via the IBM, I bet I can tweak the JCL and make it send FORTRAN programs to the IBM just as if I'd punched up a deck of cards. Tweak tweak tweak, send it off, and Eureka! it worked!
Next step: For various reasons, the first version of SANE truncated all lines after 72 columns. That was absolutely fine by me, as it helped me write my FORTRAN programs for class without ever going too far on a line. So, instead of laboring over a clunky keypunch machine, I edited my programs using a full-screen editor, and sent them off without ever having to touch an actual punch-card, keypunch, or card reader. This increase in efficiency meant that I could do my FORTRAN classwork a lot faster, which was A Good Thing.
When it came time to turn in a project, though, there was a catch -- you were required to turn in a deck of punch-cards! Well, the prospect of having to go down to the keypunch machines was not appealing in the least. There *had* to be a better way. So I asked one of the computer operators (you got to know them pretty quickly) if there was an automated card-puncher. He answered "Yes, we've got a keypunch in the machine room that'll take a file from the IBM and punch it out on cards for you." So after a few false starts and multiple tweaks of the JCL, I was able to send my program to be punched onto cards, and the next day there was my deck of cards waiting in the "TO BE PICKED UP" set of pigeonholes. Yay!
The project was due a few days later; I tested the deck of cards to make sure it really did work, and turned it in on the due date. A week or so later, Dr. Southworth (my FORTRAN prof) handed back the graded assignments... but not mine. I went up to him after class and asked what was up. He said "Your punch cards don't have any printing along the top." I looked, and sure enough, no printing. I looked closer and saw faint marks on the cards in the shape of the characters, and said "Aha! The card-punch machine in the machine room needs to have its typewriter ribbon replaced, or at least re-inked." I'd said this aloud, and Doc Southworth slowly said "In the machine room? Why were you using the punch in the *machine room*?" So I had to explain to him what I'd been up to, using the fullscreen editor on the PR1ME to edit my programs and then sending them over the HASP link to run them on the IBM, or to get it punched out on a deck of cards. And he said "All right, I'll accept your assignment. But only if you show me how you did it, 'cause I want to be able to do it too."