Console
The console was a selectric typewriter. I think the selectric had one of the best keyboards ever, the touch is not like anything available today. It’s the typewriter with the golf ball to type. There were two metal tapes that spun and tilted the golf ball. Sometimes one broke and, until the IBM guy came to fix it, you could continue to run if you could figure out what it was saying. Most of the time you could since a lot of what it typed was job name and start/stop times, often that did not matter, and the odd request for a tape. You ran these jobs almost every day and you probably knew what tape it was asking for.
There was a box of printer paper below that it pulled from and the paper piled up, folded nicely most of the time. At the start/end of every job it printed a couple lines out with stuff like the job name and time. When a job required a tape it would print a line asking for it. Hang the tape and hit enter. If a problem occurred you might get a line about it. Jobs that had to match a number to one printed on a form, like a check, would ask you what number to start at. Jobs that required a special form would print one with Xs where the lines went and ask it it was aligned. You could say no and it would print another and ask again.
At the college we had a job, for the new operators, that said it wanted a form. When the operator said the form was in it printed the Xs. The instructions were wrong about how the form should be aligned so I was impossible to get it right. It asked if the form was aligned and when you said no, after moving the paper, it would shift where the Xs were and print again. It would go through this a few times, moving the Xs each time to make it impossible to lign up. Then it would cancel due to improper form alignment. A great laugh at the expense of the new guy.