Texas Company's Antique Computers Are For Production, Not Display

Posted by timothy on Thursday April 25, 2013 @05:32AM from the commute-by-horseback-numb-with-ether dept.

concealment writes "Sparkler Filters up north in Conroe [Texas] still uses an IBM 402 in conjunction with a Model 129 key punch – with the punch cards and all – to do company accounting work and inventory. The company makes industrial filters for chemical plants and grease traps. Lutricia Wood is the head accountant at Sparkler and the data processing manager. She went to business school over 40 years ago in Houston, and started at Sparkler in 1973. Back then punch cards were still somewhat state of the art." See kottke.org for an eye-popping view of one of the "programs" — imagine debugging that.

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Re:Debugging that... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-04-25 05:52 · Score: 0, Flamebait

Not with that kind of wiring. This reminds me of the lab we had in school to build a simple digital circuit with several TTL old style "caterpillar" ICs. A big factor between spending 1:15 like myself and 4:00 hours was having neat wiring. The champ was 45 minutes, which must have been neat wiring, fast hands, and the luck to have everything stick properly in the breadboard the first time. The 4 hour group was (sorry to say this, but it's a fact) Black girls. Big loopy wires over the boards, and every time they tried to fix one connection, they broke another. Painful to watch.