Take cover, it’s a student programmer!

It’s 1970 and pilot fish is a college junior taking courses in computer programming. And technology is progressing, as technology does. The school has just upgraded from an IBM 360/40 mainframe to a much more powerful IBM 360/65. It orders it with an entire megabyte of magnetic core memory, which adds about $1 million to its cost, and several disk drives in addition to the usual tape drives.

The disk drives and the new timesharing operating system make it possible to set up a self-service method for submitting students’ programs, replacing the old once-per-day batch method. The staff place a high-speed card reader just behind a Dutch door so students can run their decks of punched cards themselves whenever the top half of the door is open. To run their decks, students pull a reusable, color-coded header card (green is for student priority) from a tabletop rack in the hallway, make it the first card of their deck, place the deck in the card reader’s input tray, and press the green start button. As the reader reads the cards at high speed, it shoots them up against a metal bracket from which they fall gently into place and line up neatly in the output tray. Once the process is done, students remove their decks and put the borrowed header card back in its bin. It’s a big improvement, with printouts available within hours instead of days.

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