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.