Slashed letter O, unslashed letter zero

[Chuck Guzis]

On 4/26/22 12:44, Fred Cisin wrote:

> One of my cow-orkers, a programmer, insisted that it was much faster for
> him to type as he composed, even on a 026, than it was to write on
> coding sheets, and then hand it off.

There is something to that.   Many was the time that I'd be punching
late at night (just go to the keypunch pool area and pull up an 029),
where I'd stop and say "nope--that's not going to work" and then revise
my code on the fly.

Management got so evangelical about the "programmers don't keypunch"
that they moved the single keypunch (that serviced several systems)
outside of the machine room into the hallway and put it on a 10 minute
timer.   So those of us with block time on the machines just brought up
o26 and typed our stuff in on the DD60 and punched it on the 415.
Later, we'd have to take the deck and interpret it, but it was good
enough for on-the-spot work.

Nighttime at CDC was a great time for bootlegging.  The guards knew
better than to fool with programmers.  Occasionally, we'd get a CE who
took umbrage at those guys (not me) who smoked, and drank coffee at the
console.

Whole operating systems got written at night, I suspect.

--Chuck