Old BAMA chums reminiscing about HALF A CENTURY AGO...
"Weren't there times during the semester when folks with their stacks of cards would stand in line in order to get to the computer terminals?"
"If they had stacks of cards, they would have been waiting for an operator to take the cards and run them through the card reader which read them and put the program into a queue to be run. If you could get to a terminal, you didn't need cards. Once your deck had been read, you would wait for some length of time that could be anywhere from ten minutes to overnight, depending on how busy the machine was. It was THE computer for the campus, meaning it also ran payroll and every other administrative data processing function. If you had an assignment to turn in and it was time to run payroll, tough luck--student jobs had to wait.

Oh man, this is bringing back memories. Punching the cards was a nightmare, because most programming languages had some kind of strict requirement for placement of code in columns. One mistake, not just in alignment but any kind of typo, not caught before the job was run, and whatever length of time you had waited for turnaround was wasted, because the machine would just puke up the whole thing.

And then there was the fun of dropping your 150-card COBOL deck and trying to put the cards back in order...I think I need a drink...."


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card?fbclid=IwAR3j_Q76WnCz5TfwYfwoXtco0WrMWQFDiB5hgOe2M-sNMarredKW7a5z28o