[ale] OT: Pranks are out

[Sean Kilpatrick]

Time to show my age.
First computer I ever had "student" privileges on was a
Borough's 5000?). Huge mother. This is the mid-60s and the
thing basically was 15 or 20 refrigerator-sized modules
cabled together, plus another half dozen high-speed tape
decks. Only inputs were punch cards and perf. paper tape.
Only output permitted for under-grads was the high-speed line
printer (800-lines-per-minute).
More to the point is that undergrads were only allowed to drop
their program decks into the hopper between midnight and 5 am.
(And those first programs had to be in machine code! Fortran,
Algol 60 and other compiled languages were withheld until the
second semester.)
So, what to do when you notice that some astro grad student has
just dumped 2-4 boxes of cards into the hopper in front of you?
It is going to take the machine more than 15 minutes to read in the
cards and God alone knows how long to actually run his program.
(Mind you, this big, honking computer was slower and had less RAM
than my first Atari.)
Open the box and see what color card he is using. Grad students
back then considered it a point of honor (or something) to turn OFF
the print option when they were actually punching their programs
onto the cards, so there was never any helpful data at the top
of the card. Insert the matching card in the card punch machine
and bang out a simple loop of form feeds on the line printer.
The thing would shoot the paper nearly eight feet across the room
where it hit the wall and piled up on the floor.  All the computer
operator could do from his console was abort the program -- and
load a new box of paper into the printer.

Sean