Flashback to the days when the mainframe is king, punch cards are the standard medium for programs, and timesharing terminals are a huge boon for programmer productivity, according to a pilot fish who was there.

"Timesharing was available only during scheduled hours, and not available during peak production times at night or weekends," fish says.

"But in order to complete testing for a special project, I needed timesharing to be made available during non-scheduled hours, along with access to the CPU and tape drives for three consecutive weekends."

The project is very important to fish's boss, so there's no problem getting the resources allocated. But then another programmer, who's working over the weekend, finds out that timesharing is available.

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