This wiki is Chuck's brainchild, and grew out of a recurring FYI he has given over the years, on the history of UT computing. Related materials. It was presented to the IT@UT community by FYI on 2/25/2015.

Chuck came to UT for graduate school, joined Data Processing September 1981, left for a year to teach English in China 2/82 - 1/83, and has been in UT continuously since March 1983. Since 2004, he has held the title of Fundraising Scientist.

Data processing in 1981 was a 2-week 5-challenge process in Natural 1.0. One of those challenges was a batch job. To submit it, you used a screen interface written in COBOL.

Then there were a few of challenges in Eazytrieve, a package designed for reading records from a flat work file, usually 80 characters, which in the old days could have been punch cards. Eazytrieve was quick for selecting, sorting, summarizing and returning output. To use Eazytrieve, one needed some JCL. In one of the challenges the trainee was to “simulate punching the output to cards.” The standard JCL the trainee was given had

//SYSPUNCH DD SYSOUT=B  

where “B” was the punch and “A” the printer. In those days, the secretarial staff four times a day loaded a cart with all of the output from user services and brought it upstairs to deliver to the programmers. Woe to the trainee who left it SYSPUNCH=B and got a fat card deck delivered for all to see.

COBOL training then was 3-4 months.

Trivia: Cat-owners tend to give for the arts; dog-owners tend to give to athletics.