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Texas Company's Antique Computers Are For Production, Not Display
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.
at Florida Technological University (now called UCF). I remember a few instances of seeing people trip or drop stacks or boxes of cards on the floor and then crying when they had try to reorder them to get their program to work.
Yeah, so did I. You were supposed to use the last 6 columns for a number that you could use in sorting the cards. We also used markers so you could line up the cards based on the position of a diagonal stripe on the edge. PL/1 - what a language! I had to write an assembler in PL/1. It was a great way to learn what we used to call "structured programming".
Company where I worked decided there perfectly fine AS/400 systems were not good enough and would save lots of money replacing the 20 year old system with SAP.
Hilarity ensued.
(and lots of 70 hour weeks... only 5% implemented with 15 years worth of projected savings already spent).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
...that would take documentation of the plugboard wiring of the old 400 series "accounting machines" and produce source that would work exactly the same as the accounting machine, give 80-column card images for the data. It wouldn't emulate any cross-connects to other tab equipment (sorters, punches, interpreters) but it did a wonderful job of moving plug-board programming to the more modern computers (360, in particular). Anyone know where that software might be? As I recall, it was on a micro-spool of magnetic tape originally, purchased at user group meetings. Time to google...nothing so far...
I was the only girl in my high school physics class. At some point we had to make 1-tube radios (6J5). This was a way long time ago! Anyway, I was very nervous about cutting my wires too short so I had quite a bit of wire on there. I had an extra "tickler" coil which was patched with nail polish where I had to splice two wires together. The tuning knob was stuck through a piece of a refrigerator dish.
The day of the trial came. The teacher came in with a big battery and a pair of earphones. First they tested all the techie boys. They had nicely arranged boards. Many of them had actually done some electronics work at home. Some of their kit worked; some didn't. There were only about 7 of them. They drifted out of the room.
The teacher hooked me up -- and mine actually worked! A surprise to all of us. I had never soldered anything before, and had biked around town assembling the collection of parts that I had looked up in a book somewhere.
The point of this is that those of us with no engineering background whatever can be relied on to do something weird when first confronted with it. Not that those young women were really qualified; that is another issue. But big loops of wire? I can relate to that!
IBM 402, 403 and 407's were tabulators not computers. As an old IBM program support rep., the first time I ran in to an RPG program it made no sense to me till I realized that RPG is nothing more than an emulation of a tabulator control panel.
The key to the whole thing was the rubber banded few cards at the front of the box that ran IEHSORT(?) on the sequence numbers of the rest of the box.
I would love to see what they have spent on maintenance over the years for that electromechanical junk.
I would love to see what they've saved on not having a bunch of programmers wondering why the latest Java update broke everything.
I had a very annoying related bug in a mainframe program once that took me forever to get to the bottom of, where a text parser I had written was getting the weirdest errors. Eventually I discovered that somewhere in between the input text file on disk and my program was a virtual card punch and virtual card reader - each line of text went through as a virtual punch card for legacy reasons - and the virtual card punch was being ever-so-helpful and automatically punching sequence numbers in 73-80!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
That's because the new system is frequently implemented in the latest version of a one-size-fits-all, Three-Letter-Acronym, popular technology of the day. And that's because the implementers are obsessed with flexing their technological prowess, instead of solving the business problem. I know a guy who would start by insisting this company should replace this thing with a Grails / Hadoop based solution. Why? Because he's a Grails and Hadoop fanboy, not because they have anything to do with this business' needs. When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like Michaelangelo's Pieta.
The bigger question is if this could be replaced with a "faster" system. It probably could, but you have to consider the entire manufacturing and accounting processes it handles. Do they punch the cards and include them with the job? Do workers write notes on the punch cards before returning them? How would all those activities be replaced? There are tons of further things to consider, like a shop floor is a notoriously dirty environment. Labels might be tough because adhesives won't stick due to oil on the work products. A beeping scanner might not work if the employees wear hearing protection. And no matter what, if you have to retrain your employees to do a process differently, there will be a temporary slowdown due to the learning curve.
On the plus side, if you are honestly looking at your business process with an eye to changing the automation, you can probably find places where the new automation would help you to eliminate waste. Do the shop guys measure things with a dial caliper and write them down? Plug in a data collecting caliper and skip the pencils. Do the guys have to move a job sheet from bin to bin as they do their work? RFID tags on the bins could eliminate the handling of the job sheet. Can a new scheduling program help you find the more profitable jobs, or the faster paying customers, and move them to the front of the queue when cashflow is tight?
There's likely a lot of things they could improve with automation, but any of them would involve a lot of change, and many people are uncomfortable with that much change.
John