Do You Remember Old School Computing??

[Gerry Zagorski]

While in college back in the late 70s I worked part time at IBM in Dayton NJ and used to manage time and material records for job costing.

The people in the plant would pencil in their labor hours and materials on punch cards. I would collect the punch cards, take them to the punch room and the ladies would punch the written information on to the card, creating a hole or punch into the cards…. From there I'd go over to the collator which would sort the punched cards in the sequence they needed to be in.

Once the cards were sorted we’d feed them into the card reader. Then you’d have the computer room guy pull the program (which was on mag tape) and run the cards against a program. The computer that would read the cards and run the program, occupied the entire first floor of a huge building.

A few hours later you’d get a call to let you know your report was ready and we’d get boxes of paper reports on the job costs.

Now I could probably do this on my smartphone while sitting on a beach.

Man I would love to show my grand kids that set up. I wonder if they’d even get it… Never really thought about it before, but I guess I was really fortunate to have a job at IBM and be involved with computers in their early stages.

Ahhhhhhh when men were men. Cool stuff and a trip down memory lane.

[Wilson]

I remember being in my 10th grade Data Processing Class, putting jumper wires into a plug board containing hundreds of holes in it.
After we plugged these wires into specific spots we would the punch cards on a IBM machine. Then put then into a reader machine along with the board with wires and wait for the thing to do it's thing.
After all was said and done we had a print out of every students name in the school, printed out on 11 x 14" green bar paper. How exciting!

All of the above took about 2 weeks at 45 minutes per day.
And I got a D grade because I was very bored.

[LeftyReeler]

thank god for smart phones and electric reels....

[Rick-D]

Funny, I too was an IBMer, but in the 90's.

I remember in the 80's working with a scientific machine that cost 10's of thousand and being impressed it had a 10 MB disk. Thing was the size of a large pizza and looked like something hotel room service would bring you on a tray.

[Jersey Charlie]

I used a computer in Hiigh School, it was called a slide ruler. I'll bet very few know what they look like!

[Pennsy Guy]

Originally Posted by Jersey Charlie

I used a computer in Hiigh School, it was called a slide ruler. I'll bet very few know what they look like!

We used to call 'em slip sticks....