‘Green-bar’ paper, anyone? by rhoing

‘Green-bar’ paper, anyone?

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!)

1 year ago (“Only subject of the day…”): http://365project.org/rhoing/365/2013-09-20
2 years ago (“When your Mac needs recharged…”): http://365project.org/rhoing/365/2012-09-20
3 years ago (“Butterfly bush”): http://365project.org/rhoing/365/2011-09-20

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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!
October 7th, 2014  
@westerly45 Yep; slip a semicolon and the FORTRAN program wouldn't run!! The only computer class I ever took. 1974 or '75...
October 8th, 2014  
Went through many a ream of these!
October 8th, 2014  
Up until two years ago we had to examine piles of green-bars when looking at time records. I hated it
October 8th, 2014  
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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