When I Was In Graduate School, by Don Orth

If you are currently a graduate student or have been out for sometime, let’s see if you can guess when I was in graduate school. All my graphics and maps were created with Rapidograph pens with different tip sizes, lettering stencils, and rub-on letters and numbers.

Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph.  Source

 

Presto^TM Rub-on Letters and Numbers. Source.

I had a Texas Instruments handheld calculator. For data analysis, I used programmable calculators that were secured to benches in the statistics department. 

 

TI-30 handheld calculator.

I learned computer programming on a mainframe IBM 370 Model 155 with the FORTRAN language.  

IBM 370 Model 155   public domain Source.

Data were entered manually on punched cards. The sound of punch machine room was deafening. Wish I had those Bose noise deafening headphones for the many days I spent punching data on Hollerith cards.

 

Used Hollerith punch card. Pete Birkinshaw from Manchester, UK • CC BY 2.0

 

Classic computer keyboard: The IBM 029 Keypunch  source

4.5 megs of data on 62,500 punch cards in 1955. Source.

Starting a program meant either carrying your card deck or tape to another building where the computer was likely in a basement room and submitting to a computer operator. Or you could use a terminal, such as the Decwriter, a line printer terminal. Yes, we would communicate with the computer one line at a time!

 

A DEC LA36 DECwriter II Terminal   Source.

Magnetic tape drives were standard parts of mainframe computers through the 1980s.  The nine-track tapes (10.5 inch reel) developed by IBM for its computers could store up to 175 MB per tape.

IBM tape drives.  Source.

Data manipulation and analysis was with SAS.  I learned SAS 76.  This was pronounced “sass,” never “Ess Ayy Ess”.  SAS was an acronym for “Statistical Analysis System, which was developed in 1966 with a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to 8 land-grant universities to analyze agricultural data. SAS was taken private in 1976, and henceforth called “SAS Institute, Inc”. In 1976, Base SAS consisted of ~ 300,000 lines of code.  A SAS program was written on punch cards, in a language similar to PL/I.  Semicolons were required at the end of each line.  If you left one out, the program failed and you ran back to the punch card room to fit your error. And PROC statements were and rigid syntax were required. 

I learned fish population dynamics with my TI-30, FORTRAN and BASIC programs.  Imagine how disruptive my teaching was which had students play fishery simulation games on the computer (Li and Adams 1976). My first personal desktop computer was an Apple II. was one of the first computer with a color display, and it has the BASIC programming language built-in, so it is ready to run right out of the box. I never used a spreadsheet in graduate school  VisiCalc, a spreadsheet, was the first killer app for the Apple II.  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc  Lotus 123 was released later.  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_1-2-3

 

Apple II with monitor and floppy disk drives

I typed my thesis and dissertation on an IBM Selectric electric typewriter. Even all equations with subscripts and superscript and special mathematical operations. I never had email in graduate school.  We used snail mail to submit applications and multiple copies of manuscripts.  The first email I had was in early 1980.  Orth@bitnet. net was my address. BITNET was the precurser to the world wide web and file sharing was done with ftp and Gopher.  

 

One equation from Master’s Thesis (Orth 1977)

I didn't think it was difficult at the time.  I simply didn't know of any other options.   I received my PhD in 1980.

References

Li, H.W., and P.B. Adams.1976. Three computer simulation games for the instruction of fish population dynamics. Fisheries 1(1):22. https://swfsc.noaa.gov/publications/CR/1976/7626.PDF     

Orth, 1977. Development of a computer simulation model of largemouth bass population dynamics.  Master’s Thesis, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater. https://shareok.org/bitstream/handle/11244/19142/Thesis-1977-O77d.pdf