old slave
FELIS RESPICIENS
When you are a poor student who has to scape a few pennies to buy either paper or beer, how do you get a ream of paper for free?So I was working as a programmer, using FORTRAN mainly. The computer was a CDC6600, a "RISC" (reduced instruction set) machine, designed to be very fast. We punched in our programs on cards, and they were read in. (Recall that in the very early days there were no computer languages, and one had to enter programs by toggling switches, so this was a sophisticated improvement.) One day, over in the corner of the keypunch room, a little CRT monitor with a keyboard appeared, and everyone wondered what it was.
The whole thing was in a basement under a gym (reminds me of Fermi's first atomic "pile" under the football stadium at the University of Chicago, which had the potential to start a runaway chain reaction and blow up the city), and the air conditioning would often go out and force them to shut the machine--which was huge-- down to avoid overheating.
Gremlins are real. Recall the "Great Galactic Ghoul", which scuttled many of the early Mars missions, protecting the planet from spacecraft.
Do some sums in FORTRAN using said punch cards, but 'accidently' end up dividing by zero. Plenty of paper in the output as long as you don't mind the word ERROR! written neatly down the side of each one.