[ih] Internet-history Digest, Vol 69, Issue 50

[John Shoch]

For those of you who enjoyed the Stanford film mentioned by Geoff G.
mocking punch cards vs. time-sharing  --  a little more background:
--Produced by John McCarthy to feature his Zeus time-sharing system
running on (I think) a PDP-1.  (It may have shared the computer room with
the IBM 7090 and a B5000 shown in the movie).
--The film was actually written and filmed by Art Eisenson, at the time a
graduate student in Communications, and later a writer in Hollywood.
--Today Art shared this amusing story:
"  Wow, thanks! I haven't seen the completed film since we screened it at
Stanford's Communications Department. ... Gary Feldman told me it was
screened at a convention in Australia a few months after we made it, and
there was a lot of laughter - except from the delegate from IBM, who stated
loudly "I don't see what's so funny about that." "
--The role of Ellis in the movie was played by Hamit Fisek, a friend of
Art's who was attending Stanford on a Fulbright.  Fisek got an MS in CS,
and then an MA and PhD in sociology, and became a professor in Turkey.
Decades later he still had the moustache, turning gray:
https://sarkac.org/2020/07/hamit-fisek/

John Shoch

Message: 4
> Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2025 14:44:12 -0700
> From: the keyboard of geoff goodfellow <geoff at iconia.com>
> To: Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org>
> Cc: internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> Subject: Re: [ih] What does TELNET stand for?
> Message-ID:
>         <
> CAEf-zriem_1C2t1sVXtSV56LfxR1KfJTY-gOyE-MAYq5qdf0YQ at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>
> On Sat, Aug 23, 2025 at 10:42?AM Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
> > [...]
> > At the time, the most common way to use computers involved punch cards,
> > and there were rooms of card-punch machines available to write your
> > programs.  Timesharing was relatively new, rapidly emerging as a way to
> > actually interact with a computer in real time.   It was much more
> > pleasant that other jobs where I used punch cards, submitted my deck,
> > went back later to get the printout, figured out why it crashed, fixed a
> > bug, and repeated until my program worked. [...]
>
> please "enjoy" this fun short "Ellis D. Kropotechev and Zeus, This
> marvelous time-sharing system" (produced by none other than John McCarthy
> and Gary Feldman in 1967) that "documents" the issue of computers involving
> punch cards -vs.- terminals and timesharing most spectacularly:
> ??https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dv5shcFi-og
>