In the sixties, the IBM time-sharing system CP-67† would physically punch an "accounting card" on one of its card punches whenever a user logged off or did some other billable event, such as printing a listing.
CP-67 ran on the 360/67, which was a 360/65 with special DAT hardware that allowed it to provide each user with their own virtual machine with its own address space.
Yes! I had to extract some data (in 1997!) off a DOS payroll package written in about 1985 that ran on an IBM 286. It was churning away quite happily. It seemed a bit like a 3270 terminal style application so I assume it was inspired by something distant and IBM. That had track on and track off!
On a side note, it was pretty easy to get the data off and reverse engineer the file format using visual basic at the time.
Around here, it was "wand in" and "wand out" because they used a light pen to read a barcode on their badge to access the AS/400. My Dad still says "wand in" when he logs into his Mac.
The first time I heard the word "abend", I asked the speaker what it meant. He couldn't really answer: "you know, abend!" Eventually I got the sense that it meant "crash", but it seemed like some crashes met his unarticulable criteria and some did not.
And, from the Jargon File, the joke was that this is what happened to jobs at the end of the day because the operators would shut off the computer before they went home at night, so it originates from the German Abend (evening).
