During an introductory computer class at Lehigh in the fall of 1976, a fellow student scribbled the following lines on the margin of his notebook. I interpreted this as a series of punch cards of the university's batch system.
LOGIN, A1234 REWIND BATCH INPUT
The CDC SCOPE commands for the University's CDC 6400. The card sequence was read as an input file.
- Line one, the login authentication.
- Line two, the input file is rewound to the beginning.
- Line three, the rewound file is sent to the system input queue.
Rinse, lather, repeat.
I recall this sequence of events. The previous day, the "fellow student" had executed the three punch card sequence, a self-propagating program. At the remote system, the communications would go dead. He asked me what they thought, I blew him off during class. He asked me what they thought, and I blew him off during class. Later that day, he repeated it and was caught by LUCC staff, not liking their system being crashed. Weeks later, the "fellow student" had a job cleaning out the computer paper waste bins at the computer center.