John Donovan, who taught systems programming at MIT, say that you could prioritize your deck with a green card on top - a $5 bill.
That class had a special breakout session on JCL - remember that? We ran on a 360.
wow and I thought learning basic pretty much by myself on a ti/4a in the 4th grade was cool lol (I still miss blasto and hunt the wumpus)
This, I’d like to know. I’d come out of retirement if I could get another DCO (Digital Computer Operator) job part-time. All the better if night shift, when things are quiet and easy.
Last time I looked in the want-ads for a DCO job must have been 30 years ago or so – it seemed to me that by then, all jobs advertised as “Computer Operator” were really nothing but data-entry work.
As my post above implies, I was a DCO (Digital Computer Operator) on a night shift, at a major multi-mainframe installation at a major research lab. We ran long jobs that could run four hours (or even days) at a time, and most interactive users weren’t there at night. So it was quiet and peaceful, and we got paid 15% extra as well just for working night shift.
We spent a lot of our time reading novels, doing crossword puzzles, or playing some Star Trek game. I spent a substantial amount of time playing Hunt the Wumpus. That was until somebody put Adventure onto our machines, then I spent all my time playing that.
If you still miss Hunt the Wumpus, you can certainly find umpteen implementations on-line that you can either download to your computer or mobile, or play on-line.
It was always fun writing programs to display patterns in the register lights. We had an old Univac SS-90 in the basement of the Engineering Bldg. at Berkeley. (So, a bit of a hijack in this DEC PDP thread.) There was a mathematical toy called Think-A-Dot around 1970. One guy programmed the SS-90 to emulate that in the register lights, and you could play it interactively by making entries on the 12-key console keypad.
Ah yes! The memories. I worked with a PDP 11/80 and RSX-11M+ that was running some industrial equipment. Programmed in FORTRAN. Actually it did a very good job. I also remember having to back that sucker up using a single huge removable disk drive (forgot that model number. Was it RL02??) It took, like, 11 of them to do a complete backup. And if there was an error on the 10th one you had to start all over again. Took hours. And since we did this on facility downtime it was usually at about 1 in the morning on a weekend when it was finished.
From the 2021 SDMB Celebrity Death Pool, but from the link above, he bought
a PDP-8 computer for his home in the early 1960s. “Mine was certainly the first in a private house, anywhere,” he claimed. “I personally have had a computer longer than anyone in the world — brilliant!” He used his “home computer” to compose electronic music. In 1968 he was featured at the First London Concert of Electronic Music by British composers, held at Queen Elizabeth Hall. There, he premiered his “Partita for Unattended Computer” — the first performance ever of live unaccompanied computer music. Later that year, he used the PDP-8 for a project where anyone could whistle a tune to the computer, which would then improvise on the tune.
I thought of you guys when I read that.
We had computer operators where I worked even in the early 1990s. The computer room was mostly off limits so there had to be someone to put printouts into the slats when they were ready. (This was in one of the DEC-VAX environments where I worked.) Additionally, we still had a lot of lengthy batch jobs on a daily basis, so someone needed to be there at night in case something went wrong. I’m sure there was more to it than that, like HW management functions of which I knew little.
Speaking of old Digital minicomputers, who else remembers the Datatrieve Wombat?
No love here for the IBM 1620 ?
4900796
I never coded for it, but when I was in high school I read a bunch of 1620 books, and I learned what an assembler was from them. Came in handy when I wrote my own assembler for the LGP21 my high school had.
Cooper Union had a 1620, but much to the chagrin of my parents I went to MIT instead. Cooper Union was free back then.
My high school district had a 360 of some sort. I used to tag along with my nerdier friends but swore I wouldn’t touch a computer until they got rid of punch cards. I was true to my word, but understood why TRS-80 FORTRAN was built around 80 columns, though the computer could only display 64.
Unless it was an old 360, I’m impressed. They were pretty expensive for a high school. Even Cooper Union didn’t have one, just a link to one for programming classes, or so they told me.
I had a friend whose father owned a plant with a 360, and my friend got to play with it in high school. We was very good at knowing the macros with bugs that let you get into supervisor mode. We never did any damage, just printed out messages confirming where we were.
A. School district was/is well off.
B. It was fifty years ago, and I’m re-assembling memories of something I wasn’t paying all that much attention to at the time.
C. The card sorter (as I recall, one could do a lot with just that) was a cool, pale grey and IBM blue mit die blinkenlights.
D. I spell cool (color warmth) grey with an E and warm gray with an A. Don’t you? 
E. Why do people seem to think I know what I’m talking about? 
Ah, card sorters! I bet most Dopers have never used, or even seen, a card sorter.
When I was MITSFS librarian (MIT SF Society) we had all our books in the Pinkdex which consisted of one punch card per book. Every six months or so I brought the deck to the MIT Computer Center, where I sorted them on a card sorter not hooked up to any computer and printed them on a card reader hooked to a printer also not connected. This was long before we could do a database.
That room had all sorts of neat equipment for dealing with cards and the like.
You could do a lot of "almost database " stuff with IBM’s punch card technology, pre-computer. For my database class I bring in an old IBM 402 plug board and point out how the thing could be wired to print, duplicate, and calculate totals based on things like a column being changed, to perhaps add up a department’s total sales. I have a 1960s Time Life Mathematics book whose sole paragraph about programming was referring to punch card and plug board technology.
Our operations center continued using cards for batch jobs late into the 80’s.
A batch job was submitted by a control card. The format varied. Usually it was just a few items. 20210501 20210530 S B. Would give a Summary totals report for May. B means the report is burst and distributed to departments.
The control card was punched by the data center op manager.
I used to wondered why it wasn’t entered at the console. But that would have put a lot of responsibility on the Operator.
I’m relieved that my personal hijack contributed to the thread. I love these threads about old computers but the only DEC I’ve ever been in the presence of might have been an ill-conceived home computer running some form of CP/M.
Oops! I may have tickled someone else’s memory. Back to sleep for me!
Do I remember rightly that Byte would include Rainbow translations of generating the Fibonacci sequence? As I recall the Rainbow did well in that, like being the king in 1982.
I wasted the Eighties and Nineties watching Computer Chronicles while a baby lay in my lap with a bottle, and the oldest wonders why she does so well in STEM courses, barely remembering keying HELLO WORLD into a TRS-80 Color Computer.
Wife would say that they were my problem from the moment I got home until I left for work, and she wondered why i took so many night and weekend courses. My Sunday 6AM C course had me driving to class on Easter morning.
I’m one 3 hour class away from a certificate in PC support. I asked the department head if I could substitute something else for the MS-DOS class, whinging that it was 1998 and I could TEACH the bloody class, but it was no go.