1. The Realization

One day, in the late 1980's, I had just taken an assignment about 1,600 miles away from home. For my initial journey, I packed up as much as I could take on the airplane. I expected to frequently commute back and forth for several months, so my first priority items did not include a soft copy of my resume.

Upon arriving at my new desk, the first thing for which I was asked was an updated resume. All I had with me was a hard copy of my resume, and I did not want to re-key the whole thing into a new computer file. Note that we did not have scanners in the 1980's. My resume required much changing. I had additional employment.

While coping with the quandary caused by this problem, I remembered how I did my first resume--before I had been exposed to computers. I had used an ancient practice known as cut-and-paste. You just type up the new sections of your resume, make cut-outs of old parts to bring over to the new resume, and paste everything together.

Thus using this ancient practice -- that will some day be a lost art -- I was able to create what I needed.

This incident proved that there was life before computers.


2. The Computer-less Environment

In the 1940's and early 1950's we had devices know as EAM Machines, which stood for Electric Accounting Machines. These machines were primarily made by IBM and utilized an archaic input form know as the Punch Card , and an archaic programming device know as the Plug Board .

Only very fortunate people had this "advanced" technology at their disposal. Others, without punch cards and plug boards, had mechanical calculators known by such names as Frieden, Monroe, and Olivetti. Huge rooms full of clerks spent their days banging numbers into these machines for accounting, billing, inventory, and other uses. Other people had mechanical typewriters which typed directly onto paper, and each error had to be manually erased and corrected. But reading about these archaic tasks might be too gruesome a task for the young minds of today. Consequently, I will begin my reflections with the people who were considered the more fortunate of the time -- The Punch Card and Plug Board set, whom I will call the EAM People.

The EAM People had three primary types of machines, (1) the key punch machines on which they punched holes in the punch cards, (2) card sorters, and (3) the accounting machines that interpreted the programs wired into plug boards.

2a. The Punch Card

If you have never seen an IBM punch card, it was a piece of cardboard, about the thickness of a 3 x 5 index card and cut into a rectangle about 3" by 7 1/2". One corner of the card had an angle cut in it so you could identify a card that was not correctly oriented. Each card had 80 columns and 12 rows. You could punch 80 alpha-numeric characters of data into each card by placing a distinct pattern of rectangular punches in each column. There was a strip on top of each column on which you could print the information on the card. Each row on the card had a name: The top row was called the 12-row, the row below that was called the 11-row and the ten rows below that were called 0-row, 1-row, ... , 9-row. Data were punched into the cards as follows: An numeral was identified by a single punch in one of the ten bottom rows. The top three rows were known as zones. An alphabetic character was identified by two punches, one in a zone, and one in one of the nine bottom rows.

Figure 1 shows such a card as copied from a 1957 FORTRAN Manual. Note that this card was specially printed for entering FORTRAN source code. A generic card would be blank except for the matrix of the integers 0 through 9. There approached an infinite number of special formats for cards for every conceivable purpose. Figure 2 describes the codes punched into these cards.

Figure 1 -- A Punch Card



Figure 2 -- Punch Card Codes

2b. The Card Sorter

These cards were sorted by mechanical sorters that could sort one column into one of 14 pockets, one pocket for a punch in each column, one pocket for no punch, and a reject pocket. Pockets could be turned off, so that you could sort only on the three zone punches, the ten numeric punches, or the nine non-zone punches. The special punches, shown in Figure 2, may have been added only for FORTRAN. It does not appear that they could have been sorted. A column could be sorted for numerics or alphabetics. Sorting would start at the right-most column to be sorted. If you were sorting numerics, you would run the cards through the sorter once for each column. For alphabetics, you sorted twice for each column, first on the non-zones and second on the zones. You had to remember to change the column and, for alphabetics, pockets between sort passes. Can you imagine sorting 10,000 cards on 45 columns and then messing up the 46th and having to start over? Sometimes you could recover. I am not sure how alphabetics and numerics in the same column were sorted. A zero would seem to collate between "R" and "S." I presume that when you sorted on the zone punch, everything without exactly two appropriate punches would go into the "reject" bin. This bin would sort out all of the numerals. The "reject" stack could be appropriately merged with the alphabetics for an alphanumeric sort.

Cards came in boxes of 2,000. Each box was about 2 feet long.

2c. The Accounting Machines

The accounting machines were mysterious devices that looked like large floor-standing printers. At one end was a card reader that read stacks of punch cards and at the other end was a set of tractor wheels and print bars that spewed continuous form paper. The brain of the machine was the plug board, which was the program. Plug boards were programmed by the gurus of the time. Most people had no idea how they worked, but they could direct the accumulation and printing of data from punch cards on to paper. These machines could also punch out additional cards, so that if you had a process that was more complicated than a spreadsheet summing operation, you could do it in more than one pass. Figure 3 is an example of an IBM plug board.

Figure 3 -- An IBM 407 Plug Board