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| Yes, spent lots of time in Lefevre the semester that I had the FORTRAN class, then a bit more time later working for the Ag. Economics department. But not long after that we were working from CRTs or remote terminals--Texas Instruments terminals about the size of a portable typewriter (if you're under 25 you're excused if you ask "What's a typewriter?"), with all output on a tear-off roll of thermal paper, operating over the phone lines at 300 baud (roughly 30 characters per second).
640K ? That depended on the job. You'll probably recall that the JCL (Job Control Language) cards at the front of the card deck requested the resources needed for the job--how much memory, whether you'd need reel-to-reel tapes to be mounted before the job executed (looked up in a library and physically mounted on a tape drive by computing center staff!), or whether you needed to use the hard drives--which at the time were more expensive to use, but of course offered random access to data.
I believe our FORTRAN class jobs each requested 128K of main memory. If we had a bigger job for our final project, we could ask our teacher to let us access more memory. (Programming classes were all allocated a certain amount of $$ of computing resources per student, I think, and the instructor had to keep the class within that allocation.)
Yes, those were the days...
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NDSU Fargo Computer 1977 Picture
