Ward: I thought we'd talked about IIT, but maybe I just read it on you wiki and meant to bring it up the next time I saw you and forgot...
Anyway, here's my synopsis:
Circa 1969-1971 I got involved in programming at my high school (Oak Park-River Forest High School). We had two math teachers who taught programming, and a TTY connection to IIT. At the beginning, IIT had an IBM 360; by the end, they'd switch to a Univac 1108.
The high school set it up so there were stand-alone TTYs in the library. You'd punch your program onto paper tape and hand it in. It would get read into the TTY connected to IIT, the results printed out, and finally returned to you. As Ward also recalls IITran Language flow control to the IIT computer was achieved using X-off (it would send an X-on when it was ready for more). But it took the TTY a while to stop, so you had to add some rubouts after the X-off to give it time. As a result, one of the sequences permanently etched into my memory is CR/LF/X-off/rubout/rubout/rubout. Sigh.
I soon graduated to being one of the students entering the tapes into the IIT-connected TTY. Which meant I also got the play with the IIT computer directly.
At one point, the high school considered buying a PDP-8. They had it in for evaluation, and I got to play with it for maybe an hour before the rep yanked it away from me. They decided it was too expensive.
The same teachers (Norm Thompson and Phil Rendone) taught a weekend intro programming class at IIT (perhaps one of the ones you took, Tim). I had a job as an assistant there as well. In that case, it was punched cards. But at least for some of the classes, they decided that teaching students to key punch during the limited time was too much. So instead, we pre-punched cards that were given to the students, but shuffled. Their job was to order them into a working program, remove the "extra" cards, and hand them in. Then we'd run them through the computer and return the print-outs to the students -- or actually, we'd submit them to the computing center and they'd run them...
I also (like Tim) took the 1620 course, which was cool because you got to be hands-on with the computer, rather than just submitting card decks and getting print-outs back. Their 1620 didn't have a disk drive. So the two-pass FORTRAN compiler was a bit complex to use: you'd load pass one from cards; input your program; it would punch out an intermediate deck; you'd load pass two; then input the intermediate cards previously punched; finally, it would punch out the program you could then load and run.
At the time, computers were monolithic, iconic things that only the anointed got to touch directly (like moon rockets and nuclear reactors). I sometimes wonder if I would have been as fascinated with them if, like today, everyone was carrying one around in their pocket. But I like to think that the greater attraction was the inherent abstract beauty of programming.