Card decks and envelopes (for output) were deposited here for collection by Operators. Users had to fill in a Job Request card coloured according to the priority. Machine readable resource requests were punched on the first card of the job such as:
JOB :S111,NMRJOB1,JD(JT 8 MINS,MZ 30K,JC P)
The JC parameter specified the job priority and consequent charging rate. Orange Job Request cards being used for high priority class P jobs. The GEORGE 3 job scheduler (HLS) controlled the starting of jobs from a Job Well ( a queue of jobs input from cards ). The scheduler was a locally written program ( ca. 4000 lines of PLAN the 1900 assembler ) and occupied about 4K of core at a time when the 1903T had a total of 96K ( 40K being used by the OS ) leaving 40K or so for users jobs. When HLS expanded to 6K with added features Keith Woods insisted I overlay it back down to 4K (overlaying was DIY paging & not for the faint hearted !). The GEORGE 4 OS with paging allowed larger virtual jobs to be run at the expense of throughput and was loaded periodically instead of GEORGE 3. The Job card parameters allowed for an OS request parameter ( G3 or G4 ) so that users could select. If G4 was specified then the HLS would only dewell ( start) the job when that OS was running. HLS ran from 1976 to 1986 - 10 of the 12 year life of GEORGE at UEA ( compare that with todays Microsoft OS lifetimes ).
Here is an example job well listing.