My first experience was at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. In the late 70's, while working on a degree in Computer, Information Science, I took a job as a midnight shift student operator once a week. At the time, the school had a Burroughs B5500 for academic, and an IBM 360 for the administration. Some things I remember were the jobs that ran overnight updating the student master file, a huge sequential file that spanned three disk packs (no databases back then! ). I also remember for jobs like that, we ran under an environment called POWER, which stood for Priority Output Writers, Execution processors and input Readers. Finally, no talk of the 360 would be complete without mentioning that control in the upper right corner of the panel that said "EMERGENCY PULL". How many nights I thought about what would happen if that were pulled!

Those were some good times back in the day!