Ah! "Terminal" thank you Ted! Excellent information.

I think this is more likely from the early 1980's. I'm pretty sure the person in the picture is a grad student who worked for the computer center at the time. Based on that I think this was taken after the mainframe had moved from Amos Eaton to the VCC (in fall of 1979), but I do think this photo is from some room in Amos Eaton. I'd expect it's a room on the second floor.

Technically a 3270-ish terminal did not have any way to edit any files. It had to be connected to a IBM370-architecture mainframe, and it provided a way that the mainframe could put a variety of fields on the display. Some fields could be modified by the user, others could not. This was used to create a "visual mode" in the MTS editor, where the editor could read the modified fields from the terminal, and update a file based on those changes. But the terminal had no direct access to any files on the mainframe.

The "computer" is a Courier terminal which was a clone of an IBM 3270 terminal. It was connected to the mainframe, IBM 360/370. The photo was likely taken in the late '70s when RPI was moving from heavy reliance on Hollerith cards to "smart" terminals which could edit code locally on a page (typically 25 lines). The picture was likely taken in one of the terminal rooms on the first floor of Amos Eaton; the chair he's seated in really looks like something from Amos Eaton.

While the person in the photo looks familiar, I can't provide a name. He could have been one of the graduate students who worked as a consultant in Amos Eaton for those of us who had trouble with FORTRAN, other programming languages, or MTS (Michigan Terminal System).