Great story! Reminds me if the time I was using the Naval Electronics Labs' (San Diego) mainframe as part of an Explorer post, semi-officially during high scho

Great story! Reminds me if the time I was using the Naval Electronics Labs' (San Diego) mainframe as part of an Explorer post, semi-officially during high school (1971-ish), and got ambitious, writing a compiler in the assembly macro language. Wrote it up on the punch card forms, several thousand lines of code. Submitted it to the punch card crew, and got it back several days later with a rather strong note about what project to charge it to. Turns out it was quite expensive to punch several thousand cards and they expected our group to be submitting little programs in Fortran, not monster assembly decks. Oh well, somehow it was glossed over. They ended up hiring me that summer to do some systems programming so I guess they weren't too mad.