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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.
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!