Many years ago, I was a user of an IBM 1130 computer system. It filled a small room, with (as I recall) 16K 16-bit words and a 5MB disk drive, which was quite n

Many years ago, I was a user of an IBM 1130 computer system. It filled a small room, with (as I recall) 16K 16-bit words and a 5MB disk drive, which was quite noisy. I would feed in my Fortran program, then head down to the other end of the building to get coffee. The computer would think about the program for a while, and then start writing the object file. This was noisy enough that I'd hear it, and head back to the computer room just in time to see the printer burst into action. (Please feel free to reference the Monty Python “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch. But this really happened.)