MY MEMORIES

Charles Glenn Petersen

1972 - Missouri Years I

Northwest Missouri State University (continued)

As we were packing up for the move I got a call from the Chairman of the department I would be in, I think it was called Statistics and Computer Science. He told me that one of his teachers had just quit and that they now needed someone to teach the Advanced COBOL Programming course. Would I be willing to teach it he wanted to know? What could I say, I wanted the job although I knew I was now in over my head.

As soon as I got to campus I started writing COBOL programs so I would be ahead of the beginning students. I had no idea what I was going to do about the advanced course. I walked into the advanced course the first day and told the students that since I was new I had no idea how advanced they were, so we were going to start by reviewing where they stood in their knowledge of COBOL. This was my way of hedging until I could get up to their speed. I’m sure the students were rather bored the first couple weeks, but we got through it and we all learned a lot eventually.

The campus had only one computer, an IBM 360 with about 64 kilobytes of memory. It was the university administration’s computer and students got to use it from 5 pm to 10 pm Monday through Friday and 4 hours on Saturday morning. All programs were submitted via punched cards with the results printed on the old fashion striped green 11 by 14 inch paper.