I was a regular member of the UCLA Computer Club circa 1973-1978 as an undergrad Math/CS major. It was the most transformative time of my life and I remember the rich color emanating from 3514 Boelter Hall.

I was in the UCLA Computer Club from 1960 to about 1964. I remember taking free FORTRAN classes taught by the club. One of the instructors was Steve Crocker (I think). In 1960 there was no Computer Science major. The club was the way to learn about computers at UCLA. I was a math major, but spent my entire working career in computing.

"I was working in the Graduate School of Computer Science in the 1970's and knew several of the students in the computer club. I would love to get in touch with my favorite, Evelyn. I don't recall her last name but she got me out of a real bind at one point. I was updating Dr. Kleinrock's VITA, had put in several weeks at this point, and it disappeared somewhere in Never, Neverland in DOS (I, obviously was not a techie). Fighting tears, I ran to the computer club and found Evelyn, whose fingers flew over my keyboard like magic and she found my document in maybe three minutes. I'd love to speak with her. "

"In the 1950s and early 1960s, the computer could only run one job at a time. You made arrangements to use the computer. Then when it was your time, you signed a log book with the time when you started and when you ended. That log book was used to keep track of the time you used and possibly to bill your department or you. That is where the phrases "log in " and "log out " come from.Later, when batch processing systems came about in the early 1960s, a stream of jobs was sent to the computer and it executed the jobs one at a time. The computer kept track of how much time each job took and that was used for billing.By the mid 1960s, computers started to support multi-programming running multiple jobs at the same time. The computer system would keep track of how much CPU processing time was used by each job and bill accordingly. However, some jobs used a lot of CPU processing time but other jobs used very little processing time but did a lot of input/output. So some places billed based on combinations of CPU processing time, number of input/output operations, number of operator tape or disk mounts, pages printed, cards punched, etc.At UCLA, there was rule that we could only bill for time. I don't remember whether that rule came from the university or the state or some government agency providing grants but we could only bill for time. So the Campus Computing Network that ran the big computer created the "Machine Unit Second " abbreviated MUS. This fictitious unit of time was calculated using a formula based on CPU processing time, input/output operations, pages printed, etc. and converted it into a "unit of time " so it could be billed.The UCLA Computer Club provided access to the computer for students who wanted to learn programming. They sold punch cards. As a joke, they made a pun on MUS and put a Moose on the card."

"The "MU$ " under the moose relates to the processing charge unit for the IBM mainframe computer that the UCLA Office of Academic Computing (sponsor of the Computer Club) used for accounts. It stands for the Machine Unit Second charged for each program job run for processing time, paper usage, disk storage, tape usage, and so forth. Before I joined the UCLA Computer Club in 1978 the MU$ (pronounced "moose ") had been selected as the club mascot."

"The Moose was a riff on the acronym for how computer time was charged -- the Machine Unit Second (MUS) -- students were given an allocation of MUS for each class. After each program run, your printout would show how many MUS were used, and how many were left."