To save paper, mainframe tech ruined a week of work

Another working week has arrived, bringing with it the chance to shine or commence career decline. The latter is the sort of thing The Register often writes about each Monday in "Who, Me?" – our reader-contributed column that shares your stories of workplace errors. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Mark," who took us deep into computing history because his story comes from his time working at the UK office of legendary mainframe maker Sperry Univac. Mark told us this was the time of "punch cards and operator scheduling of jobs and prints. Tapes and the big old disk platters." And no monitors – when a program ran, its results were sent to a printer. The inventory job ran in what Mark called "top memory," separate from the shared memory used by smaller workloads. Two printers were in place, so different workloads had their own means of creating hard copy. …