[ih] Historical fiction

[Miles Fidelman]

Craig Partridge wrote:

>>
>> This is an interesting side note that may be of interest to Sytel in
>> writing fiction.
>>
>> In the 1970s and 1980s, many leading universities had multiple computer
>> centers run by different departments/agencies (for instance, Harvard had
>> at least four around 1980).   In many cases this was a response to an
>> administrative unit (department, school) being unable to get the computing
>> resources from the main computing facility.
>>
>> In most case I learned of, the relationship was one of cheerful competion
>> between the centers on the same campus, except when every few years the
>> main computing guys would attempt a takeover and get beaten back.
>>

At MIT, circa early 1970s, the story was just a bit different.  The 
admin folks kept a 360 behind locked doors, with very controlled outside 
connections (or none, I really don't recall).  The story was that they 
were rapidly paranoid about students hacking grades, transcripts, bills, 
and so forth.

Now this could have been just a story, but... this was the same period 
where John Donovan taught an introductory programming course, jointly 
between the EE/Computer Science Dept. and the Sloan School.  The first 
problem set we delivered on punch cards, for execution on a 360, the 
second we ran terminals via 360/TSO, the third on MULTICS.  At least for 
the 360 problem sets, we had to wrap the jobs in JCL statements that 
invoked a grading test/grading program.  Notable among the instructions 
was something along the lines of 'you can try to hack the grading 
program - if you succeed in giving yourself an A on the problem set, it 
sticks, if we detect the hack, you get an F.'  Kind of suggests that the 
admin folks' paranoia, if real, would have been more than justified. 
:-)     [this was the same course where a buddy of mine answered a 
question on the final with "the bit bucket overflows and the bits spill 
out onto the floor" - not sure why, but that's always stuck with me, 
perhaps because it was an appropriate answer to the question]

Miles Fidelman

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra