I flunked out and the let me try again. Also gave me a scholarship and a federal work study program job. I got offered either run the computer or buss tables in the cafeteria.
Ran the computer for the summer,1969, and during the school year, 1969-1970.
Flunked out again.
Now some stories. Skip them if you want.
The computer got moved from its original home in an old building with holes in the floor for cabling to the basement of the brand new library. There was a cutout so people could walk around and look through windows and down on the machine. All in all a spiffy place.
The machine ran during the day and at night we generally would start a simulation for one of the college departments that ran all night. There were two real operators and a bunch of work study grunts (I was one of them) who did most of the work. For the summer I worked 40 hours a week and when school started I worked part time.
We had a club at the school that would do computer things on the weekend. They could not be alone, a real operator (I was considered real) had to be there to run the machine. One Saturday I got there and a kid was already in the machine room. Turns out the raised floor came out into the lobby and then into the rooms next to the machine room, for expansion, and the kid had pulled up a floor tile in the lobby, gone under the floor, and came up in the machine room. He agreed never to speak of it again and the college agreed to forget all about it.
Sometimes you got a bit bored standing around while the machine thought. There were a bunch of rubber bands on the ledge by the windows around the top. Not a good look for anyone who looked down to see a bunch of rubber bands on the ledge. They told us to stop.
Another fun thing was to take a couple inches of new cards, slip the top and bottom cards a bit, make an underhanded throw, and let the middle slip out and have the rest spin away. The pack would stay together, most of the time, and we would toss it back and forth. When it didn’t stay together we spent a while picking up the mess of cards.
The most common thing we ran was whatfor.
The CE got the entire machine for a couple of hours each week of preventative maintenance. You never knew what he would do. Some days he would clean the print train, sticky paper and a program to hit all the slugs. Some days he would upgrade the CPU, replace a 8 inch wire with a 12 inch wire.
Most of the time we sat around and did nothing. A little busy work like picking up rubber bands, and then nothing. Someone had to go for coffee. How to decide. Often the CPU just sat there. I did a little machine language program to add 1, jump back to the add. I put it in with the switches on the front panel, cleared the total to 0, and hit start. Each of us would pick a number. I hit stop and whoever had the matching number got coffee.
Eventually my enrollment ended and with it the federal work study job.