Composing on paper, Green-bar, hardcopy output, card decks (L ong)

From: Chuck McManis <cmcmanis_at_mcmanis.com>
Date: Tue Jun 20 14:08:19 2000

>I seem to remember pictures being drawn on the decks to
>allow the user to peer through the computer room window to see if your deck
>was due to be run soon.

Very common trick at UNLV as well where I "borrowed" the CDC machine to do
a summer job for the Clark County Classroom Teachers Association.

>Worst setup was MU Computer Sciences where you turned
>in the cards and got back output in 24 hours. Many times with message CPU
>time exceeded and no output.

At UNLV there was a sign at the deck submission window that said, "turn
around time is 2 hrs." However on weekends there wasn't very many jobs
being run so turn around was like 2 minutes (deck to printed output) but
one old witch of an operator insisted on holding your printout for an hour
or so before giving it to you. (Being the nice young teenage male that I
was I would point out to her that my printout was sitting in the printer
out basket. :-)

Then she came up with a "scam." When I asked for my printout she would say,
"It hasn't run yet, the queue is full." Which might have dissuaded me
except that I could log into an interactive terminal and figure out that
this wasn't true. So I wrote a deck that resubmitted itself with a random
job name through the virtual reader. After running it the Queue really was
full! With about 1000 jobs! She got a freaked trying to kill jobs in the
queue that were obvious gook, but of course anytime on ran it would
immediately fill up the queue again. Finally she shut down the entire RJE
station (the actual computer was in Reno I think) and deleted everything by
hand (of course some of the jobs "looked" real because their randomly
generated names were credible, restart the RJE station and Whomp! full
queue again. Finally, she just shut it down, deleted everything, and
restarted it.

I got my printouts from then on without any additional commentary.

--Chuck
Received on Tue Jun 20 2000 - 14:08:19 BST