Queue-less

It’s 1968 and this high school pilot fish is learning Fortran IId programming on Saturdays at the local junior college. For class projects, programs are punched onto cards with an IBM 026 or 029 card punch and run on the computer department’s IBM 1620 “small scientific computer.”

The only direct print output is a painfully slow, 10-character-per-second IBM Model B1 electric typewriter. But the 1620 is equipped with a much faster card punch, so everyone directs program output to cards and then prints them out on a reader/printer supplied by the computer lab. Of course, because everyone does this, the lines to use the reader/printer are excruciatingly long.

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