Watch your step

It’s 1969 and pilot fish is a college sophomore taking several computer programming classes. There are no terminals and no timesharing, only batch processing. Students punch their programs onto cards in a room with a half-dozen keypunch machines, carefully check them against their heavily marked-up printouts and repunch any cards that need to be corrected. The final step is to carry the card decks to a nearby table, where a teaching assistant takes the rubber bands off, puts separator cards between the decks, and carefully places them in metal trays. Once a day, he loads the trays onto a rolling cart and takes them to the computer room.

And once a night the operators run all the decks on the school’s IBM 360/40 mainframe and wrap the resulting printouts around them. The next day the teaching assistant retrieves the bundles and stacks them on a table, where students pick them up.

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