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Well a computer was huge, it generated tons of heat.

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A computer probably would fit in this whole room

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and it would cost a million dollars.

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Back then they were just amazing what they could do

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but compared to what computers can do nowadays they were pretty weak,

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but we didn't know that back then

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so we enjoyed the computer power that we had.

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But because so many people wanted to use the computer

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the computer had time sharing,

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so you would punch your program on a bunch of computer cards

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and some of the programs would be two thousand, four thousand cards long

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and you'd sit there with a card punch and punch this thing in

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and if you made a mistake you'd have to throw the card away and re-punch it,

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so it was very laborious.

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Then whenever you wanted to run a task, or we called it a job, a computer job,

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an activity, like if you wanted to compute a statistical analysis of some data

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you would load the program, you would load the data on cards,

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you'd bring it to the computer center, this big monster computer,

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they would run the cards through a card reader

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and then that job that you submitted would sit there

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and it could run in five minutes or it could run in five hours or it could run ten hours from now.

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You had no idea when the job would run. Once it ran you would get output from the job, printed paper.

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It wouldn't display on a screen.

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So you would have to sit there and-. Well, you wouldn't wait because you could be waiting there forever.

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What you would usually do is go study or do something else and then come back in a few hours

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and hope that your output was there.

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If it wasn't you'd have to come back.

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Well the frustrating thing is if you had any kind of syntactical error in your computer program, if you missed a comma or misspelled a word,

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it would just reject it and give you an error message and you'd have to start all over again.

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So to run a particular task could require several iterations

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One of the big things that affected the cost of the job,

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besides the size of the job and how much computing power you needed,

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was the priority which you wanted to run,

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but every time you upped the priority the cost would double

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and computing back then was not cheap. If you did a simple computer job it could easily cost twenty dollars,

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which even back then was a lot of money.

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If you run it several times you're up to a hundred, a hundred and twenty, a hundred and fifty dollars just for one run.

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So if you ran it priority one you'd be lucky to get the thing back in a few hours.

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If you ran priority two it would come back maybe in an hour or two

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but it would cost twice as much.

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If you ran priority three it would really be expensive

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but you'd get it much-well nobody had the budget to run priority three.

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We usually ran priority one but our jobs at the dental school were so large and so expensive

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and so time consuming that we ended up running a lot of stuff priority zero

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which meant that it would only run at night.

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That's the only time they would run it.

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So I spent many, many nights

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getting there at midnight, and usually I'd be one of three or four people at the computer center,

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and back then you could sit your job in and it would come back within a few minutes

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and you could correct it, put it in again, and just get a really good turnaround,

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which you could not do during the day. So you ended up working a lot at night and lost a lot of sleep.