I was responsible for an IBM/Florida DOT-modified version of the JES2 RJE
Workstation program, which ran on a 4341 in South Florida. The workstation
code was modified to support reading round-hole Remington Rand cards on a 2540
(?) reader with column binary. The round hole cards used to be passed out on
the Florida Turnpike when you got on, and collected when you got off. The
column binary, and some arcane logic, was used to determine which round hole
was punched. The other main modifications were:
1. Support for tape: A) when started, write a JOB card, EXEC card, and SYSIN
DD * card to the beginning of a tape.
B) create a 4- (cash) or 8- (charge) byte
record for each transaction, block them into 80-byte "cards"
C) At operator command, write EOF on the tape
D) read the tape and transmit it as though a
job coming in on the reader.
2. Interruptibility: since there were millions of these cards, and sometimes
the center where the 4341 was needed to submit other actual jobs, the card
reader code recognized when a job was inserted in the middle of the input, and
would send the job to the mainframe, then go back to processing the turnpike
cards.
The system was called the DYnamic Multileaving Interactive Toll Editor, or
DYNAMITE (no, I didn't name it!).
You should have seen the scramble when someone on the South Florida staff with
a very heavy Cuban accent called our receptionist and said he wanted to talk
about the dynamite!
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