And Disintegration should think about settling down and having kids before it’s too late.
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The same day? What, did they have some kid of supercomputer?
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Supercomputer? The Control Data Cyber-soandso at my uni could do that, 1986. You had to make an appointment though. And a technician would take your stack and feed it into the reader while you watched in awe from afar, i.e. the other side of the service counter.
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I’m so old that I remember that CDC was founded by Seymour Cray, and pioneered the notion of supercomputers.
I’m also surprised that a university computing center would still be using punched cards in 1986. Was this in North Korea?
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Good enough for German engineering students learning FORTRAN77.
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I always thought that programming under adverse conditions was a great way to focus attention and foster creativity. However, punched cards were expensive, and my campus had already started strongly discouraging their use by 1981 or 2.
(CDC hated the IBM hegemony over punched card technology, and sunk a ton of money into a project to replace them with typewriters+OCR.)
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The card reader broke in 1987 and after that we got to use the terminals!
However, our prof insisted that we write every line of code exactly as he had wanted the cards punched; rows 78, 79 and 80 had to contain one’s initials.
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Did you have the technology to easily reproduce a stack of cards? If so, the initials thing could have been a way to make cheating harder. (I do something similar, making my students sweat blood onto their papers.)
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Yes and yes.
Our prof (he also taught the ‘mathematics for engineers’ courses) had racked up 30+ years of experience in dealing with students by then and knew pretty much all the tricks. The consensus was that trying to fool him successfully would take more effort than just do the work.
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I’m so old that I remember when there were few enough tricks that an experienced professor could know them all.
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I’m so old that I am the same age that Ian McDiarmid was when he first played Emperor Palpatine.
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