Computing at Bryan
Circa 1974
As I recall (which may be a bit foggy after 30 years), I was teaching math at Bryan and I thought that we needed a course in some kind of computer stuff. Having had exactly one course in Fortran in 1971, just before coming to Bryan, I sort of laid out a course in Fortran. I recall that I talked to several people and someone put me in contact with the management at the Oster plant in town. We got permission to come over there and use their keypunch machines to punch our programs.
Now Oster didn't actually have a computer, but they had some kind of communication with their headquarters where they would run the cards through a card reader and dump them to magnetic tape, and then they would mount the tape and sometime during the night, the headquarters would call and the machine would "play" the tape containing the day's data and it would be received by the main computer. Then towards morning, headquarters would call back and dump the printout onto that same tape, probably adding the output file to the input file that was already there. They would then print out the tape for their reports. That was the state of the art in those days. So we could get a printout of what was on the cards as a "sanity check" before we sent them off.
We used a much less sophisticated method than Oster. Two evenings per week, at 5:00 after the day shift left, we would enter the plant after each signing in at the gate. We would then punch the cards and sign back out by 6:00. Inasmuch as cards cost about 1/20 of a cent apiece, they never charged us for them; the bill would have been around $6.00 for the whole semester I suspect.
The next day, Betty Giesemann, the chemistry teacher, would take the card decks in a bag ("I'm just the bag man," she said) and give them to her husband Jim at supper. Now that I think about it, I believe he taught evenings at Chattanooga State Tech and would take them to be run on their computer while he taught, and pick them up with the printouts before he went home. I remember the first card had to say
//JOB COMMSERV
i.e. Community Service for their accounting people. So the next day, the cards and the printouts would arrive back at Bryan, giving us less than a 48-hour turnaround, only to find out where the comma was missing, or a parenthesis or some such nit-picking detail. Then it was back to Oster and fix the problems and pray it would run right *this* time.
The next year, we talked the administration into buying a couple of cases of cards and renting an 029 keypunch for the semester. It "lived" in the unoccupied office next to mine on the third floor. We had the same arrangement for running programs, but with much more convenience because on two or three days a week we got our printouts back the next morning. I recall two things about that machine: First, Dr. Mercer said, "Is this really necessary for teaching your course?" and second, after it was delivered, a faculty member (I don't recall who) came by and said, "Is that our new mainframe?" (Well, it *did* say IBM on it!)
Finally, about 1976, Bryan bought an 026 keypunch machine (cheap), but it did not have the full character set of the 029, so there was this little square thing for subtotals or something like that, and that stood for a left parenthesis, and something else stood for a right parenthesis, and there were probably some other substitutions. The Fortran compiler had a "switch" on one card where you could tell it to do this translation.
At that time, I was taking some graduate courses in topology at UT-Knoxville twice a week, and having arranged for computer time up there, I took the cards with me and brought them back on those two evenings. (I was driving a 15-year-old Chevrolet at the time, and every trip was an adventure! I was young and foolish back then.)
It must have been that same summer that I got my first personal computer. No, not a PC or even an Apple; this was a PDP-8 with a teletype. We used that for about two years to teach a bit of programming, and I recall using it in teaching a statistics course as well.
We finally bought a terminal and a DECwriter and leased a phone line to Knoxville so students could program on a "real" computer right from Bryan. Bob Jenkins thought we should be teaching "batch" processing and was not happy with the arrangement. I guess he wanted cards and COBOL. The assistant director of the computer center at UTK came down to advise us, and I still recall his comment to Bob, "I can run batch from that terminal right there," pointing at the teletype. So we ran up quite a little phone bill for a year or so. I bought a modem for the teletype and it served the math people as a printing terminal at 10 characters per second, while the business people got the DECwriter that printed 30 characters per second. I will leave it to the interested reader to surmise which one actually got more use.
And then I left, taking the PDP-8 and its teletype with me, and Bryan bought some Commodore Pets, and I was out of the picture.
Rich Barnhart