As an additional recollection, yours truly can remember arriving at UCLA in 1968 from MIT (where - not surprisingly - computing was more advanced). MBA students - as part of their curriculum - were writing little programs that did arithmetic problems, punching them on cards, and feeding them into a machine - some kind of IBM computer - roughly the size of a dishwasher. The machine churned out the results on separate cards which then had to be printed on paper at another machine.
The cards were free and left in a bin for student use. Eventually, it turned out that folks were coming in, helping themselves to large quantities of the cards, printing ads on the back, and distributing the ads in neighborhood mailboxes. The system was changed to a vending machine that charged for cards. The vending machine was nicknamed HAL in honor of the evil computer in the movie "2001."
Note: An obituary for Prof. Sprowls is at http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/x38361.xml
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