Background to tomorrow's story
Apr. 5th, 2022 07:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
damontThis 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.
By the way, this story really calls for an icon that says "I .LT.3 FORTRAN" -- if only I find pix of the correct typeface (IBM 1430 band printer). I'm planning to tell the actual story tomorrow (Wednesday, 6 April). But for this and some other related stories t come later, a but of background information is needed. Part 0 of this story series, as it were.
BACKGROUND:
Once upon a time at the College of William and Mary in Virginia (Chartered in 1693), the gathering place for computer users was a place called Jones Basement. The focus of our attention is the machine room (accessible only to operators and admins) and the printer room next to it.
During my freshman year, the primary machine was an IBM 370 mainframe; all programming classes were still being taught on it. They had just installed another machine, a PR1ME 750 supermini. For the entirety of my college career, the printer room contained three printers. One was an honest-to-pete PR1ME printer (for the PR1ME). One was a Printronics dot-matrix printer, which was always loaded with 8.5x11 white fanfold tractor-feed paper, and thus the only printer useful for printing out essays and term papers and such. (This is important later.) Between those two was the Behemoth -- an IBM 1430 band printer, capable of speeds unmatched by today's laser printers until the late 2000s. (And the 1430 is *still* faster than most modern inkjets.)
The 1430 was this BIIIIIG box -- I mean it was bigger than two large size people. We called it the Behemoth for a reason! The top was flat and level. When the printer ran out of paper, it would warn you with several seconds of beeping, and then the printer would obligingly open the top, which would then no longer be level. HUGE warning signs were posted about *never* *ever* leaving coffee cups on top of the 1430. (I can't IMAGINE why... >.> <.< )
The printer room contained one other piece of computer equipment: a card reader, whose function was to read the decks of punch cards that people brought in. For those of you who are now asking "What's a punch card?"... they're about 3-ish inches high by maybe 7-ish inches wide, made of much the same cardstock as manila folders. Each card was divided into a matrix, 80 columns wide and 12 rows high, of rectangles (taller than they were wide), which could have rectangular holes punched in them (or not). For text files each column represented a single character, so your standard card held a single line of text with a nominal maximum length of 80 characters. "*Nominal* maximum?" I hear you asking in the back. Yep... for any serious punch card user, the real maximum was 72 characters. Those of you who remember FORTRAN may remember that you always had to end your line of code by column 72. Why? Because IBM reserved the last 8 columns of an 80-column punch card for sequence numbers. This made your card deck easy to get back in order should you drop and scatter it on the floor; they even had machines that could re-sort a scattered card deck according to those sequence numbers... *IF* one had remembered to punch them in (or have them punched in later, which was also something the sorting machine could do).
For text files, in addition to the columns of coded holes-and-not-holes, the character would be printed along the top of the card above the corresponding column. Anyway, since most of the programming classes were still using punch cards, that card reader was a VERY important element in our lives. And there you have the printer room: a small room containing two band printers (one of them REALLY HUGE), one dot matrix printer, and one card reader. Each of which made a certain amount of noise. Put it all together and you got a pretty durn LOUD room.
(Here endeth the background. Story to come tomorrow.)
By the way, this story really calls for an icon that says "I .LT.3 FORTRAN" -- if only I find pix of the correct typeface (IBM 1430 band printer). I'm planning to tell the actual story tomorrow (Wednesday, 6 April). But for this and some other related stories t come later, a but of background information is needed. Part 0 of this story series, as it were.
BACKGROUND:
Once upon a time at the College of William and Mary in Virginia (Chartered in 1693), the gathering place for computer users was a place called Jones Basement. The focus of our attention is the machine room (accessible only to operators and admins) and the printer room next to it.
During my freshman year, the primary machine was an IBM 370 mainframe; all programming classes were still being taught on it. They had just installed another machine, a PR1ME 750 supermini. For the entirety of my college career, the printer room contained three printers. One was an honest-to-pete PR1ME printer (for the PR1ME). One was a Printronics dot-matrix printer, which was always loaded with 8.5x11 white fanfold tractor-feed paper, and thus the only printer useful for printing out essays and term papers and such. (This is important later.) Between those two was the Behemoth -- an IBM 1430 band printer, capable of speeds unmatched by today's laser printers until the late 2000s. (And the 1430 is *still* faster than most modern inkjets.)
The 1430 was this BIIIIIG box -- I mean it was bigger than two large size people. We called it the Behemoth for a reason! The top was flat and level. When the printer ran out of paper, it would warn you with several seconds of beeping, and then the printer would obligingly open the top, which would then no longer be level. HUGE warning signs were posted about *never* *ever* leaving coffee cups on top of the 1430. (I can't IMAGINE why... >.> <.< )
The printer room contained one other piece of computer equipment: a card reader, whose function was to read the decks of punch cards that people brought in. For those of you who are now asking "What's a punch card?"... they're about 3-ish inches high by maybe 7-ish inches wide, made of much the same cardstock as manila folders. Each card was divided into a matrix, 80 columns wide and 12 rows high, of rectangles (taller than they were wide), which could have rectangular holes punched in them (or not). For text files each column represented a single character, so your standard card held a single line of text with a nominal maximum length of 80 characters. "*Nominal* maximum?" I hear you asking in the back. Yep... for any serious punch card user, the real maximum was 72 characters. Those of you who remember FORTRAN may remember that you always had to end your line of code by column 72. Why? Because IBM reserved the last 8 columns of an 80-column punch card for sequence numbers. This made your card deck easy to get back in order should you drop and scatter it on the floor; they even had machines that could re-sort a scattered card deck according to those sequence numbers... *IF* one had remembered to punch them in (or have them punched in later, which was also something the sorting machine could do).
For text files, in addition to the columns of coded holes-and-not-holes, the character would be printed along the top of the card above the corresponding column. Anyway, since most of the programming classes were still using punch cards, that card reader was a VERY important element in our lives. And there you have the printer room: a small room containing two band printers (one of them REALLY HUGE), one dot matrix printer, and one card reader. Each of which made a certain amount of noise. Put it all together and you got a pretty durn LOUD room.
(Here endeth the background. Story to come tomorrow.)
