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Originally Posted by rowjimmy
Everything operated on a different time scale then. I'd submit a job at a remote terminal and then purposely take the long way to the building where the printer was located (buy a soda, shave, maybe make a little chalk drawing on the sidewalk outside, my own little Turner or Constable . . .) to give time for my program to get through the queue, run, and output.
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I got in trouble once by diddling the JCL on a job to boost the priority. About 30 seconds after I submitted, I got a "Call XXXX now!" message on my screen. It was the VP of Applciations development, who wanted to chew me out for line jumping.
The DBA went on at one point about the "unheard of" support he had. At his previous job, programmers got two compiles a day, whenever the operators thought they could fit them into the job stream, and you scrutinized your crash dumps
very carefully to correct your code. At this site, if your compile blew up, you made a change or two and resubmitted...
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I remember wondering why the printer and its handler had to be inside a cage. It was like a floor to ceiling chain link cage with a little slot to slide the big green and white fanfold zebra paper through. Were they worried someone would steal a five hundred pound printer?
Then one day, after the use of a poor choice of text separator, an expected one page output ended up using around 150 pages of paper with just one number printed on each. Apparently, the cage was there to protect us students from the ire (and spittle) of the printer technician. Candy bars slipped through the slot seemed to appease him, though.
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<grin>
Ah, the big mutha line printers, complete with a controller that had its own programming language. At one point I looked into possible post processing of jobs on the printer to pretty print reports. Since it was a bank, and the reports were the columnar output we do know with spreadsheets, there wasn't a whole lot of room for creativity.
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Dennis