Slashdot Mirror
Electronic Abacus
yoey writes: "Blast from the past in an article at the Economist: There are those who do not believe in the desirability of introducing anything as esoteric as electronics into business routine at all. Others believe that there is a limited field for electronic methods, provided that they fit into, and do not disrupt, established business systems. But there is a third group ... who consider that a major revolution in office methods may be possible. This revolution would involve scrapping the greater part of the established punch card calculating routine and substituting a single 'electronic office' where the giant computor [sic] would perform internally all the calculations needed for a whole series of book-keeping operations, printing the final answer in and on whatever form was required."
this "computor" will never come close to the slide rule in efficiency, simplicity, and elegance. The slide rule will never be replaced by such a monstrous contraption. Besides, it really impresses the babes when displayed prominently in my breast pocket. ;-P
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Good morning, Dave. What are you doing?
I have to go to the bathroom.
You've already been twice this morning, Dave. Perhaps you should cut down on the coffee.
Hal, let me in. I really have to go!
I'm sorry, Dave, but I can't let you do that. Please go back to your desk.
etc.
So even if the original author used "computor" to indiciate some different meaning or usage, but a large part of slashdot would assume it was a typo (which we evidently would), [sic] is appropriate.
Man, this is an unusually anal post for me. It's too cold.
-Puk
p.s. For what it's worth, webster doesn't have "computor".
Where this article talks about "scrapping the greater part of the established punch card calculating routine", it isn't about scrapping the punch card keyboarding machines, but about using the cards as input instead of as the databases themselves. From the 1880 census until the 1950's large databases consisted of boxes (and sometimes cabinets or rooms) full of punch cards. To process the data, there were a number of specialized machines:
Keypunches: a keyboard that punched holes into cards. Good ones also typed the data along the top of the card so it was human-readable, and could copy part or all of a card. The ones I worked with could be programmed by typing control codes onto a card and wrapping it around a spool inside the machine -- this gave you tab stops and let you set it to automatically copy headers from each card to the next one, until you hit an escape key to let you change the headers...
Sorters & mergers: Sorting and grouping was accomplished by machines that would physically shuffle the cards into order. The operation was counter-intuitive; to alphabetize a 20 letter name field, you'd start by sorting into 26 bins on the _last_ (rightmost) letter, stack them up and sort on the next letter (which left cards differing only in the last letter in order), and repeat for 20 times through. Searches were done by setting the sorter to set aside cards matching the criteria and running the whole set through. And after doing a search or other operation that split the deck into two categories, it was nice to have a machine to merge the two decks back together into order without requiring a full-scale sort.
Tabulators: Would read the sorted, grouped, cards and add up the columns. Also could perform calculations on a card (like hoursworked * payrate = grosspay) and punch the answer into the card, or onto a new card. Tabulators generally did not type human-readable text on the cards, so...
Printers: One kind would read cards and type text along the top. Some of these were still in use in the 1980's, because mainframes still could output to card punches, and those punches did not type text... The other kind read cards and printed the report on paper.
When I started hanging out at the college computer center (1971), the databases were kept on removable hard disk packs, and punch cards were mainly for data input. However, even though they'd keep 3 copies of each database on different disks, the reliability was low enough that for really important stuff they'd also store the punch cards as a backup, or sometimes have the computer punch a backup into cards. The machine that printed on those cards was kept running, just in case. At least a half-dozen keypunches were in continuous use (and the card reader on the computer had to be overhauled once a week so it could continue reading all those cards). The tabulator was just gathering dust, but the sorter was used frequently -- batch database updates run faster if the input is in the same order as the disk file.