Forum Discussion
- I also remember the key punch room. The noise was atrocious.
- My first real job was working at LTV in Greenville, TX in 1967. My job was hanging tapes on drives, stocking paper, etc. The worst job was operating a machine that stripped carbon paper out of multipart printouts. Two or three part paper wasn't too bad, but there printouts that had up to seven copies.
One room had about 20 women on key punch machines. There was an ancient punch card computer in one corner that was used mostly to track inventory. The guy who operated it was a dinosaur in the computer world. He had started operating computers in the late 40s or early 50s. Programming that computer required moving jumper wires on big boards that plugged into the computer. He did have some interesting tricks. He had several stacks of cards that would make the computer play tunes as it read the cards. Useless but funny.
One of my additional duties was checking punch cards for what we would now call hanging chads. Guess I was way ahead of my time. I remember emptying the punch card machines and collecting the chads for confetti. It was impossible to clean up.
The rest of the huge room was filled with an IBM 360 computer. It had probably 20 tape drives the size of small refrigerators. There were also several Winchester IBM platter drives. Can't remember if they were 5 or 10 MB. There was a chain drive printer that was so loud it had a sound proof enclosure. There was keyboard for minimal commands to run, read, write, etc. I wonder how much ram the whole computer had...
The whole place had a false floor for cables and enough air conditioning for a neighborhood of homes. Every once in a while the air conditioning would break down and computer would shut down. There were no windows and only a couple of doors since the whole building was classified secret. Out we would go into the 100+ degree Texas summer heat.
This system was so finicky that there was an IBM tech on site during work hours and on call 24/7. When there was a real problem additional techs were flown in. More than once I remember coming to work and see a tech stretched out on a table asleep after an all nighter.
That job gave me an interesting perspective on the progress of computers and technology. - That's pretty large compared to this (128GB):
- We've come a long, long way
5 megs
16,000 megs
