This was in England in 1969. I was at Dartford Grammar school and for a general studies course we took a bus to Erith Tech one afternoon a week where there were two keypunches and a lecturer who taught us programming in Fortran IV. We punched our cards and a courier took them to Imperial College (of Mines) which is part of the University of London. They were run through the 7094 which ran PUFFT through IBJOB. The following week we would get our cards back with a listing of the program and the results. My first program (calculating Pi) worked first time and I was hooked. Most times the listings would have errors and we'd have to wait another week for our next try. I remember once the compiler printing out "FORMAT misspelled" and continuing the compilation but otherwise I don't think it was particularly user friendly. I was told at the time the 7094 had two separate offline peripheral processors, one which copied cards to tape which was then switched to the 7094 as input and another which took the 7094's output tape and printed it to listing paper. I guess the operators had the job of putting the input cards and output listings together. I happened to live about a mile from the lecturer (Tony Newey) and walking to his house one foggy night, collecting the listings for all the chap from Dartford (which was a single sex school, there being a separate Dartford Grammar school for girls which my elder sister went to). Anyway I remember dividing up the thick listing into ones for all the separate pupils and handing them out the next day so we could all consider what we wanted to change for a while before going back to Erith. One of my friends had a Reliant three wheeler (which you could drive at 16) and we drove over at lunch time once or twice to amend our card decks mid week and resubmit them. Later another friend had a mini and after he overtook going over the crest of a hill I asked what would have happened if someone else was doing the same thing coming the other way. No reply. He was a great mathematician and later worked for Lloyds of London as an insurance risk assessor. He once scored 101% in a maths exam which rather made a mockery of the math's teachers marking scheme. Anyway I don't suppose he was ever so stupid again. The 7094 was taken offline for several months so engineers could replace every single electrolytic capacitor and we were allowed to use the University's main CDC6600 which later got replaced with a 7600. After leaving school I was turned down by Imperial College because I could not pass English Language 'O' level but was accepted by Queen Mary College and again used the 7600 but this time via the college's ICL1905E and later 1904S. Most work was done on the ICL mainframes but it did not support a couple of languages the 7600 did. We also had a CDC 1700 which was used to teach us assembly language. My Fortran experience was not directly helpful at QMC because they taught us Algol 60 in our first six months and most of the rest was maths (cheaper to teach) though I did show one of our lecturers my Fortran knowledge was better than his and earned me a summer holiday job in the college's own programming department doing things like testing the NAG (Nottingham Algorithms Group) library on the 1900s. One evening system time was due to start and I was still running things on the multi access system. As I was staff they did not throw me off but asked if I could finish earlier if they threw all the other users off and stopped the batch stream. I said I didn't know. They said it couldn't hurt and did so. WOW I never knew computers so could be so fast! I was again hooked after doing half an hours work in a minute or two, some of which time was the computer waiting for me to type something. First time I'd ever had a computer waiting for me, of course now its what computers do 99% of the time but back then it was unusual. A few years back in history, before multi access systems, it had been common but that was not my experience.