57 years ago: System/360 Announcement

Note the emphasis here needs to be on the words "up to" as many System/360s weren't anywhere near 524,000 characters. The System/360 at my university started out with only 44kB. Later, when the memory was expanded to 77kB the Uni admin announced a Red-letter day in its weekly newsletter—it was a real big deal.

That said, the 360 multitasked seven operations simultaneity and thinking back I'm amazed at the extent of the engineering and research work that was actually achieved on that machine given what we now consider to be very limited resources.

Of course, we undergraduates programmed in Fortran, and to ensure that we students wrote efficient code, batch processing runs allotted just enough runtime to complete our assignments. Sloppy code would time out and the job would need to be resubmitted (and the assignment late).

Incidentally, the time-out limitation/problem became a challenge for some of us to solve and we engaged in what I'd reckon would have been some of the earliest computer hacking. In the days before security was a big deal, the computing center used to chuck its used fan-fold printouts into dump truck behind the electrical engineering school (which housed the 360). An examination of the code revealed $Job control information that allowed us to bypass the time limit. All we had to do was to punch up a single $Job card with the correct time limit info and insert it at the head of our card stack, thus we could 'dial up' any amount of processing time we wanted.

This worked well for quite some time until some idiot decided to go overboard and pinched too much time. That's when the operators noticed the batch jobs slowing down at certain points in the run (the long trays of punch cards being processed would slow or temporarily halt at those points). It always takes some fool to screw up perfectly working system that worked well for the rest of us! ;-)