This is actually a relatively hot commodity among graduate students. More about that in a moment.
These are computer printouts from “back in the day” when one had to walk across campus to pick up the output from their [computational] program, whether it ran correctly or not.
Forgot a semicolon?
» Go back to your terminal;
» run the program again;
» wait;
» then walk across campus again to retrieve the output/printout.
(Note: These are *not* word processing files printed out! “Word processing” was still done with the so-called “electric typewriter.”)
Printing was done with a mechanical head in caps-only and the paper was gear advanced (using the holes along the edges of the paper).
Today was the Department of Economics’ annual fall picnic and I was asked to attend. So I thought I would prepare a bundle for each new graduate student in the department because they often like to have large paper on which to sketch out the answers to problems with long solutions and/or long equations. This paper is 11"×17", i.e., the size of two, side-by-side 8½"×11" sheets. When I handed out the bundles to the first-year students at the picnic, I told them to be careful: the paper is older than most of them! (I saved a short stack for myself. It *is* handy to have double-sized sheets every once in a while!)
Retired economics professor (“dismal scientist”). Married 40+ years to the love of my life; we have two grown daughters, both married, two granddaughters and a...
Love your post. It brings back memories of my 80s programming course. You really had to kick yourself that all it took was an extra semi-colon to fix that program you worked on for four hours!
I remember that paper and the process! When I first started working, our payroll reports printed on this paper and I had the lovely job of filing them in the special binders just for this paper.
October 13th, 2014
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