Yes!!! How did you guess?? ;-)

Ha ha, yes, the fans. We had the fans in a underground garage just below us. The air came through a duct from the garage, under the false floor and in our room through the 1401. So we mostly didn't notice the fans noise. But ... one morning at 6:00, dense clouds of black smoke started to come from the computer, which was however running apparently fine. The morning operator (not me luckily) switched off everything and called the general manager (we were IBM in a South American country). When he came, the sleepy manager was not happy to discover that the smoke came from a burning car in the garage. The fans were absorbing all the smoke and sending it up. After that "event" the air circuit was changed a bit and the machine had to be cleaned.

Well, I spent 8 hours a day or more during a year working in the same room with the 1401, the card reader and the printer. After that time I was mercifully promoted to programming and that was on another floor. Sometimes I was standing just in front of the printer, checking if all went smoothly. Now I'm 75, and not much deafer than any of my friends my age :-)

It was my first printer too. One of the first models of 1403 on a 1401. Around 1967. Before learning to program the machine I spent some time as operator. Our 1403 was not that fast. It printed 600 lpm with the "commercial" printchain, which only had upper case characters, numbers and a small number of special characters. There were fuller printchains, with lowercase letters and such which were also correspondingly slower because there were less repetitions of the character set along the chain, so a given character took more time to get to its hammer. The noisiest "scream" was when the machine printed a line of 132 hyphens, a very popular decoration on headings. A single hyphen would pass over all the hammers on the line, which fired one after the other producing a high frequency shriek. Not too merciful on your ears but one gets accustomed to anything...

I was there too, but that came later. First I started programming commercial applications in assembler for an IBM 1401 with 8K ram. Yes, it could be done, once you forgot about GUI. On that machine I learned Fortran II. The compiler was all of 3000 cards long and you could not compile a program much larger than, say, 100 lines. Later I jumped to a 360/44, a strange beast with its own OS. There I also programmed in assembler and Fortran IV. It was not Watfor but rather IBM's own level G (or was it H?) compiler. A serious Fortran machine, even if it had only 128K. Then came DEC PDP8 and 11's. Once I discovered CRTs and fast turnarounds I never wanted to go back to punched cards and mainframes. On those minis I also programmed in Fortran. You must understand that C and Unix just were being invented. I discovered C years later. Today, yes, I also prefer C, Python and when I feel particularly inspired, Lisp. But I still keep 1401, PDP8 and PDP11 emulators in my machine so in a way I still keep in touch with those old compilers. And, after all, Fortran 95 is not that bad. I wonder if Fortress will take off...