The cards were prepared on and IBM 029 Card punch console

The cards were prepared on and IBM 029 Card punch console. I think there were only two or three of these, so they were a bottleneck.

Typically we would use a deck of cards to load the FORTRAN compiler. The compiler would process our FORTRAN programs from our deck of cards and produce a deck of cards with the object code. Then we would load a deck of cards to enable the the object loader which would, in turn, load and execute our object cards. Our output would come out on fresh cards which we ran through a tablulator to get a printout of our results.

Quite a process!

Holt started the first class by passing out the IBM 1620 FORTRAN manual and assigning us our first program. Solve the Quadratic equation. The manual was worthless for a beginning FORTRAN student. Some of the smarter guys (does not include me) bought the McCracken FORTRAN book. That book really helped and I eventually borrowed a copy and became mildly proficient in FORTRAN. Over the year we did about one program a month - now that would be one per week.