Not entirely true; the University of Central Florida offered a pure CS degree in 1969 out of their College of Natural Sciences (I was an entering freshman then). You're right that there were precious few universities offering CS then, whether affiliated with their engineering colleges or not.

In 1969 we coded Fortran programs, keypunched them on IBM 026 keypunches, submitted them for one day turnaround (overnight) batch execution on the university's Honeywell 1200 "mainframe" - which had a whopping 48K characters of memory. IBM 360 assembly language programs we keypunched and had sent via courier to Gainesville to run on the University of Florida's 360-65. Two day turnaround for those. You learned to desk-check your programs carefully.

Later on we got an IBM 1130 to play with: 8K 16-bit words of memory and a 1MB disk cartridge (might have been half a meg, I don't remember well anymore). I was hacking Conway's Game of Life on that 1130 then, at the same time as Gosper and Woods et al were hacking GoL at MIT. (We did a fair job of keeping up with them... for awhile. But Bill Gosper is a genius, with more IQ points than we had among us, and with vastly more computer resource. We were eventually humbled by Gosper's Glider Gun, as well as Woods' Atavist backtracking program.)

At around the same time we got remote-job-entry access to computers at other universities, a primitive internet of sorts. We ran APL, ALGOL, BASIC, COBOL, PL/I, SNOBOL and other alphabet soup on IBM and CDC systems around the state. A few ne'er-do-wells of my acquaintance worked out how to break IBM security (what Linux people would nowadays call a local root exploit) which resulted in some laughs... and suspensions.

Graduation saw gainful employment in the S/370 world, which I never left. IBM large systems are hairy and complex, bureaucratic and layered, arcane and stodgy in many ways... but they also solved problems long ago that the small server world is still grappling with. IBM's been doing virtualization for over 40 years kids - about as long as Unix has been around.

Many applications written 40 years ago for IBM mainframes can still be run today. I'm talking object code, not requiring source recompilation. The mainframe culture demands rock solid stability. That's a two-edged sword, for while the corporate investment in its code base is potentially safe for decades, it also means that the platform is slow to adapt to change.

That's kind of frustrating for some of us s390 gunslingers who watch the beehive of activity in the free software world with more than a little envy.

It also doesn't help that IBM closed their operating system to scrutiny about 20 years ago. IBM's "Object Code Only" policy destroyed the ability of the user community to contribute code changes back to the IBM OS.

So I still do mainframe stuff, which pays well, though it isn't all that much fun. Gotta tell you that all the fun is out there in the Linux world, where the code and ideas are all free.

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to this N900.