Since Fisher Hall is still one of the topics, I’ve decided to share my favorite story.  It was a movie night playing Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.  Movies often drew hoots, hollers, and comments from the audience, but this great musical brought more than most, and Joe Kirkish stopped the movie came on stage and admonished those who did not appreciate the film to either be quiet or leave as there were a number of patrons who would appreciate the film for what it was.  Some left, but the remainder of the evening was quiet.

I also remember with no fondness the freshmen English finals given in 135 that were a drain on my GPA.

Greg Switek

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Most of the time Fisher was just a class building.  We had physics and math there, as well as Doc Berry’s freshman chemistry lectures.

There was one part of Fisher that brings back bad memories, the computer lab.  We all had to take a Fortran programming class in the early 1970s in the Fisher computer lab.  The computer in question was an IBM 360 housed behind locked doors and attended by white coated acolytes.

In those days, programs first had to be written and then keypunched onto IBM cards with one line of program per card.  We then loaded these cards into a card reader in the hall.  We could see on a TV monitor if the computer accepted the program and started on it.  Then it was time to sit back and wait for the printed results to come out.

The acolytes that tended the computer would once in a while bring out a stack of printouts and put them in alphabetical bins so you could find them.  Some were nice and came out every fifteen minutes or so.  Others only did it when they felt like it and might wait an hour or two.  After waiting an hour or two you would get your printout and find out that the program bombed because of a typo in one of the cards.  That would have to be found and corrected and the whole process started over again.

It made an easy class into a very frustrating experience.

Towards the end of my time there the IBM 360 was replaced with a Sperry Univac machine that was supposedly better.  This one had remote terminals with printers so that problem was solved, but the darn thing broke down all the time.  At least the old 360 was rock solid reliable.

Those definitely weren’t the good old days.

Bruce Kettunen
Metallurgy ’76