IBM 610 workstation computer 3361

on the university's 709, the vast majority of programming was fortran and cobol. clbuttes were all fortran, and most of the departments did fortran ... math, business statistics, biometric statistics, soc & psyc stats, etc. admin had cobol jobs (there may have been some univ. buttembler 709 programs, but i wasn't aware of any). the 709 ran ibsys and almost everything was tape-to-tape ... using 1401 as unit record front end i.e. tapes were manually moved between 709 from ibm-main n.g.

later on the 360-67 (mostly running 360-65, os-360), most of the student stuff had moved to watfor fortran ... while departments were mostly fortg, (fortran) scientific subroutine lib. admin had converted their 709 cobol to 360 cobol.

one day i was wandering thru the machine room and everything had come to a halt and people were standing around waiting. apparently an important admin daily cobol job had been run and produced some different ending results. i had never paid any attention before, but i was told that it was a 407 plug-board job that had been converted to 709 cobol (emulating 407 operation) and produced emulation of 407 sense switch settings (at the end of the run) on the printer. the responsible admin person didn't know what to make of the unanticipated and different results. after about an hour, it was decided to repeat the run and if the (printed) 407 switch settings came out the same ... then they would buttume everything was ok.

past postings mentioning ibsys and-or 407s:

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