More of a calculator than a computer, it was a tall, flat metal device with little slots that you put a metal stylus in and either went up and over or down and over to add, subtract and in some cases repeatedly to do multiplication. Not quite an abacus.
A Univac 1108, which ran lots of compilers for the UW-Madison and general computing tasks, and reduction of physics data. The Control Data 3600 which got blown up in Sterling Hall, too. I had a job taking 9 track tapes back and forth the few blocks from Sterling to Dayton Street a few times per shift. There was a Burroughs B5500 on the same floor as the Univac (at one time due to errors we had TWO Univac 1108s on the floor, can't imagine the expense until they found the noise problem and lined the whole floor with copper foil), but I didn't ever get smart enough to program the B5, just ran it as an operator. Then we got a Univac 1106 downstairs about the same time a cute little PDP-8 with paper tape showed up. We spent a lot of time playing Hamurabi on that once we got the interpreter bootstrapped in and then the program.
First programming was from reading a book on PDP-8 instructions, sort of an orange cover on the paperback book that DEC sent me for asking, and all summer programmed and learned logic with no way to run it, the ultimate virtual machine. I'm sure ther were no errors in the code!
First real computer I owned, not just used, was a Radio Shack TRS-80 I wrote a program to plot a three dimensional wave form as a grid, taking all afternoon to compute some of the more complex functions and if you hit the wrong button it started all over.
Fun memories, thanks for bringing up the subject.