J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Paul

IPL CMS,
interrupt, program, load?

Initial Program Load perhaps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conver...Monitor_System

The first computer I worked on, was a mainframe that took
punched cards. And those had a tiny bit of JCL at the start,
and you'd slap some number of 7-8-9 (orange) and 6-7-8-9
(pink) cards to your deck (those are a kind of record marker).
I think when i was done with punched cards, I'd collected
around two boxes (4000 cards).

Hey, look! They have a picture of the pink card!!! Yikes.
It's missing the 6-7-8-9 holes in a single column though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:H...rd_Punch-2.jpg

And no, the inhabitants of the room didn't look like this.
The keypunch room looked like a hippie convention. These
people are entirely too clean cut.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...nes_in_use.jpg
https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/e...4506VV4002.jpg

Back then, they had a program to allow high-school students
access to the university mainframe.

There were 25 key-punches, but at busy times, there
wasn't a seat left in the house.

Surprisingly, not a lot of students took up the offer.
A good thing I guess. You couldn't bring food in there,
so staying there meant a bit of "suffering" :-)

Paul