At the time it was anything but ancient. We students felt both cocky and privileged in that we knew that we were some of the very few people in the country who had access to a state-of-the-art IBM mainframe.
BTW, the mainframe, a System/360, had just 44kB memory and ran 7 concurrent operations at once. It was a red-letter day when the '360 got upgraded to 77kB memory. The university's rag had the fact as large headlines on its front page.