Slashdot Mirror
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.
"THAT", (a wired board), is vastly easier to debug than any modern software. In fact a trainee can usually debug it by trial an error in just a few minutes.
Now get off my digital lawn whipersnapper!
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
don't fix it.
"If it ain't broke, don't replace it. Even if replacing it would lead to a 3 fold increase in employee productivity."
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
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.
My working C=64 ain't got nothing on this fine machine.
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".
That why you use sequence numbers in 73-80. Been there, done that. But only did it once.
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
Learned quickly to run a magic marker squiggly line over the top of those card decks...
"If it ain't broke, don't replace it. Even if replacing it would lead to a 3 fold increase in employee productivity."
A few other folks posted something similar above at the same time.
Anyway, if I were in charge, here's what I'd do:
Look at the power consumption of the machine. It's probably a lot.
Have the accountant write the specs for what that was to do.
Buy the accountant ANY damn laptop they wanted.
Sell that old machine to some computer collector that would pay through the nose to acquire.
Profit. Or at least, it would compensate the costs of moving the system to something a little more modern - a MS Office App is probably all this company needs or an intranet web app.
Why upgrade?
That machine is gonna die one day.
Having something a little more modern will allow for growth and integration.
And now long would you have to run it to spend the same amount of money it takes to buy modern equipment and pay for someone to convert your accounting over?
I like "if it ain't broke" in general, but this thing has to be a massive power drain, and when it finally does break, they're likely going to be screwed.
While in college there was still a working punch card machine on campus. Our intro to computer science professor made us write our first program using punch cards. He said we would get two things out of it. We would understand why some things are the way they are with respect to programming languages and command lines. And we would have book marks for life (the program was short but we had to buy a deck of blanks at the bookstore). I still use these cards for bookmarks.
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.
Wouldn't the power savings of replacing the computer and all the peripherals justify the replacement of all that with even an entry level PC, from 10 years ago?
Kind of like mowing the lawn with a pair of scissors. Yeah, I'm sure it could be done.
I thought the Computer History Museum got that IBM 402. There's one in the Computer History Museum now. They may have the machine the company was using for parts.
Here it is running in Conroe, TX in 2011. (Terrible video, though)
And people bitch about XP users hanging onto an old and obsolete system.
I took an embedded systems course in university (Engineering Physics program)....we had to build boards up from components, write software in assembly, and then load it into the hardware and cause the hardware to do stuff.
My longest debug session was when I couldn't figure out why my software wasn't working properly...turned out that my team-mates had mis-wired the stepper motor. Once I figured out exactly how they had screwed up the wiring I was able to compensate in software and it worked perfectly.
That's an 026 keypunch he's leaning on, not a 129.
That's why smart people punched sequence numbers in columns 73-80. It helped if you had access to a card sorter, otherwise you'd incur machine time using the sort program to punch a new deck.
There was a lot of standalone electromechanical hardware (not just punches and sorters) to support punched card data processing - my mother (now 80) worked for a utility company in the 50s and alternated her time between doing data entry (card punch) and data verification - essentially retyping the data on a card verifier with the punched card in place to check the data entry was correct.
Actually, an early version of the IBM FORTRAN compiler (for a real computer) marked the cards according to the statement type on a lexical analysis pass and then sorted the cards by that field so it could load the compiler code that dealt with each particular type of statement in turn (the computer having very little memory). The generated code was then resorted to match the original program card sequence.
Yeah, BINDERE DUNDAT.
c. 1977, cutting my teath on "real programming" in Fortran, and CDC 6600 Assembler with punched cards (post HP2000 Basic -- everyone starts with Basic - in high school). We did have a few plugboard computers, including at least one analog computer, as well.
In Liberty, Rene
...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...
OK, I get it, Sparkler hates trees. But the insanity of someone protecting their job by never updating technology is just amazing. I would love to see what they have spent on maintenance over the years for that electromechanical junk. And I really wonder where they are getting punch cards. Can you even get them any more, or are they having a printer make custom batches for them? And, of course, there is no really useable backup of all of the company's data for when the inevitable final failure hits. For less than the cost of their next punch card order they could be on a modern system with performance and good data backup. But then I guess that Lutricia Wood might be concerned that others might be able to do thing that only the high priestess of data systems does now. Good thing that she will live forever and never retire, otherwise Sparkler would be in a very bad position.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Drawing a diagonal line across the top of the deck is faster and lets you insert cards without having to resequence.,..
accounting intern:"damn, looks like the microwave is getting repaired. wanna go out for bbq?"
accounting director:"we dont have a microwave. you mean the accounting computer down the hall??"
BOFH:"so heres the dead man that just pushed a hot pocket into the 402 and took down payroll! let me get the punch cards kid, you're in for a fun night."
Good people go to bed earlier.
seeing people trip or drop stacks or boxes of cards on the floor and then crying
Grab a marker pen and draw some diagonal lines/crosses on the edges of the stack. You can easily see which ones are out of order.
You can also see if anybody has swapped a couple of them around as a "joke".
No sig today...
Replacing this dated equipment will also result in replacing operator, and that can have all kinds of hidden costs. If someone worked for your business for 40 years and is loyal and productive employee, then why do you care if they want to do it with punch cards or abacus? They had 40 years to prove that whatever they are doing works, unless there are new process requirements, there is no reason to change
Decision chart:
1. Did any processes change or about to change? Yes/No
Yes - Go To 3.
No - Go To 2.
2. Job gets done? Yes/No
Yes - leave it alone.
3. No - look into optimizing/fixing.
One critical irreplaceable part breaks, and they can no longer process payroll or inventory.
All because they don't want to hire somebody to spend a week or two to replace the functionality of that obscene waste of energy with a simple spreadsheet. The simple value of data security, not to mention the inter-operability between the data generated and things like, I dunno... check printing and direct deposit, for example, seems obvious.
I'd also guess there would be a lot less work for their accounting department. Either they could save the expense of one or two peoples' salaries, or at least spread the workload savings among the staff. In any event, it simply doesn't make sense not to modernize it.
"Don't mess with Texas's old computers."
Seriously, don't mess with them or they will stop working. I feel like just taking a picture of the insides of that thing will make it fall apart.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
http://xkcd.com/385/
Trust me on this, wiring skill isn't normally supposed to depend on possession of a pale pink penis. You're totally doing it wrong.
PHB: "I want to fire Wally, but I can't risk it. He says he's the only one who can program the Zeberpupin system." Wally: "The word you're trying to think of is 'indispensable.'"
To be more realistic, the guy who operates that machine will be retiring in a few years, the people who are willing and able to work it want to be paid premium bucks, also have a tenancy of having a huge ego problem that makes them difficult to work with. The new system is easier to find guys who can do the work, and they will be more willing to work with you.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It BELONGS in a MUSEUM!!!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It: Ancient Computers in Use Today
Dark Reflection
How much is the IBM support contract for this?
No offense AC, but there is an element of "stupid" to doing this. How are you going to fix it if it breaks, and more importantly, what will it cost? Also, the same thing could very likely be done with off the shelf commodity hardware and some cheap (or free) accounting software. Accounting productivity would be DRAMATICALLY increased just in the amount of time saved each day. Sounds to me like someone in that company is lacking some serious business sense. Punched cards had their day, but that day is long gone.
I went there when it was still called FTU. I remember the exact same thing. I remember seeing someone drop a large box of cards in the Florida rain which of course meant they lost everything. I went there 1977-78 ... when were you there?
-Eric
Especially the ones that don't even need punch cards to run. Mechanical computers can handle everything from algebra to complex calculus, and are completely impervious to EMP or hacking (except, perhaps being literally hacked, like with a hacksaw).
Take this one for example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1i-dnAH9Y4
Cool. Never thought of that one... Or rather was never told that one by the prof or upper years.
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
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.
This company is probably the only one in the area that will still be operational in case of a nuclear war. that type of computing device is pretty much impervious to EMPs.
Just sayin'. Bet lots of you wise-guys couldn't even figure out the manual.
Thanks. That would have been real helpful 40 YEARS AGO!
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.
Yes, that was SOP when I was in college, but it only helps. It is often possible to swap two cards an not make a visible "jag" in the line. Still, it works pretty well.
I used to see people carrying multiple cardboard boxes of cards and was impressed until I learned that they were fairly simple COBOL programs. That is when I decided to never learn COBOL. Once saw a student crying after dropping a two tray COBOL deck on a windy day.
Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
I would downmod this, and trust me... I don't have any clue who you are.
Hope they aren't still renting that thing. I remember how hard it was to convince my grandma that she didn't have to keep renting her phone.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
In 1973 a small company could buy a computer to keep books, so well it can still be used today, but just ten years earlier, NASA, with a budget of 6% of the USA's GDP, wasn't able to use computers to help design the F-1 engines?
Amazing what the invention of the microchip brought about, isn't it?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Drawing a diagonal line across the top of the deck is faster and lets you insert cards without having to resequence.,..
Cool! I knew someone would appear with a useful tip I could use in tech job interviews!
Ezekiel 23:20
Cobol != punch cards.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
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.
and then crying when they had try to reorder them to get their program to work
That was the tears, later came the laughter when CA's mainframe Librarian product would state:
"-END CARD MISSING - MAKE SURE DECK WAS NOT DROPPED"
Even though it was reading from disk or tape...
(This was about 20 years ago, As far as I know it still does this to this day)
...because the new owners of /. are to busy swimming through their money ala Scrooge McDuck to simply spend a little time moderating and deleting crap like this, despite being reported constantly.
change for the sake of change. Let me say up front that i've worked in IT for over 15 years. Mostly as a DBA but I did network admin, hardware, development and OS.
I keep hearing how the next version will do X, save Y amount of time and Z money. Won't require as many people to maintain it, etc. Yet it never seems to be the case. Vendors keep us on a continuous upgrade cycle because bug fixes aren't back ported or to get the latest security patches, etc. Managers, architects seem to focus more on resume building than a stable environment.
I can't get any commitment for maintaining production but if i'm an hour late on a project task i'll have an army standing in my cubicle harassing me. I constantly hear developers wanting to go back to the basics because the new piece of software that's supposed to make their life easier isn't as stable.
Yes, I love to play with the latest and greatest features but i'm not sure if from the companies perspective if its always worth the money. I have to say working in IT support can be a very frustrating and stressful job.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
I used all that gear in high school and high school summer jobs. I've wired panels for an IBM 402, an IBM 407 (the last of the electromechanical accounting machines and the best one), a 514/519 reproducer (a 519 has a mark sense reader option), and the 77 and 84 collators. And, of course, card sorters and punches. I was able to draw graphs with a 402 and generate poetry with an 84 collator. This is pushing the limits of those machines.
The normal processing cycle for a sales/billing operation looks like this:
The card operations aren't that bad. All this stuff is slow, but automatic. The data entry is the labor-intensive part of the operation.
True. But you have to admit, much COBOL was stored on and run from 80-column or maybe IBM 96-column) cards. Boxes and boxes of them, given the amazingly low code density (i.e., verbosity) of the language.
I would venture here and now in the 21st Century COBOL is safely away from punched cards. However, my Air Force computer programming curriculum 30 years ago was 4 weeks (out of a 6-week class) of COBOL punched onto cards and run in batch mode. Rubber bands and the designated runner of the day to take the decks across the base (6 blocks) to the system room to be compiled and run.
You absolutely DID NOT use the compiler to check your syntax when your code-compile-checkout cycle was measured in hours and you had two days to complete a project. Fanatical desk checking was the rule of the day. And since the instructors were competitive assholes and introduced an under-the-table prize for the first in the class to complete the project, so was sabotage of everyone else's decks. The runner of the day was a hell of a job... wonderful opportunities for bribery and also threats.
Now get off my runway!
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
The main cost of getting off of old systems is usually converting data to a newer format. Is there any bargain-basement way of doing that here? I am thinking of something like, using an arduino connected to the 402's printer port to capture data to a PC, and then having the 402 "print" all the old data. The 402's blazing print speed of "100 (80-column) lines per minute" doesn't sound fast enough to bury an Arduino or even a gen-1 USB connection.
:>D
I am not a professional programmer but I think if I knew the guy and liked him I might be willing to help for free--or at least, pretty darn cheap. The money involved has to be part of the issue here. Of course, maybe they only know how to create programs on the 402.... So what they'd really want is a 'virtual' 402 program, where they could change reports by 'wiring up' new on-screen programming boards.
Really? We used to drag a marker across the top of the cards in a diagonal line from front to back. It was immediately obvious which cards were out of order.
And that, audience, is why sort routines were so popular back then.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
That is what I meant.
It did originally.
The reason COBOL required indention originally (and the reason it generally no longer does) is because it was necessary for punch cards. The indention moved the holes to where the card parser could identify codes correctly.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
I used an IBM 403 to run a Boy Scout mailing list in the early 1970s. It's the successor to the 402, and has 133 vertical bars with the character set on them, which slide into position based on the program and punch card data and then get whacked with a hammer to print. The kids and most of the adults weren't allowed to mess with the plug board on the side, but we could do anything we wanted with the paper-tape driver and the keypunch and card sorter, so there was still a fair bit of hacking room. (There was one adult who knew what he was doing with the wires.)
Later, when I got to high school, the girls in the secretarial-track training got taught how to actually program the things (I think; they definitely learned keypunch typing and drum programming, but I think they also got to do the wires.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I have to admit, that actually *is* sorta cool. Imagine, you can probably repair a bit on that computer with a well-bent paperclip. When everything goes down the drain, this thing will still be up and running, maintainable and you will be able to build your own spare parts for it using a regular toolbox and a soldering iron.
Then again, my very first computer, a PC 1402 Sharp Pocket Computer from 1986 with cashstrip printer is probably like a bazillion times faster and more powerfull than that thing. It would probalby take less than two weeks to replace the entire workflow with a single cheap-ass current programmable calculator and you could add some features along the way. That makes it quite strange too. Cool, but very strange.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
It's a shame that I don't have any mod points...
Lurk more. Shit was never deleted before. Go take a look at old GNAA shitposts from 2001 if you don't believe me. The only post I've ever seen deleted was one with a link to child porn a few years back, and one due to a DCMA take down (there is an article about that, but I'm too lazy to find it).
I, for one, am glad they don't take it upon themselves to censor the place because a few idiots who need to be babysitted can't figure out how to hide -1 posts.
PL/1 yay I worked on a system in the 80's the used PL1 (and FORTRAN) on PR1ME do do map reduce for the billing system used for dialcom systems in the UK
Sort routines, my ass. 083 sorter ftw!
They sound like they are completely dependent upon these cards, and would have to expend at least a few hours of effort to replace them. But overall, converting would probably cost less than two service calls from the card punch guy, and would pay for itself in not many weeks.
On the other hand, they operate a museum piece and are making the news as a result. Free advertising. Lighten up.
John
That's when I was there! Maybe we ran into each other back then.
Sure, we used punch cards for the two Fortran-for-engineers classes I took in '66-67. We coded Fortran IV and Fast Fortran using "official Fortran coding forms."
It works when the requirements are set high for some artificial reason, for instance to reduce numbers of applicants to a popular course or school, and the actual background required to do the course is less than demanded. Of course that creates a lot of ill felling where some people that couldn't get in via general entry are allowed in, but if you have a limited number of places and want the next generation of doctors or whatever to be spread all over the country instead of just in the affluent parts of major cities then admission has to be a bit more complex than just the few with the highest test scores. Sucks for those that miss out but better overall.
Given the large amount of statistical analysis from testing results and the large amount of theoretical analysis, I'd be mightily surprised to find that computers were not used for this.
http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4206/ch4.htm#110
provides a bit of background.
For much of the testing and engineering fixes, it was largely slipsticks and blackboards, per some of the anecdotal personal remembrances found by search, and a lot of brain-box "sweat" from the wealth of practical engineers who worked on them.
In a small company like that? The head accountant who was there for forty years could certainly make the call to upgrade the system if she wanted to. At the most she might need the OK of the boss that she is on a first name basis with. But simply saying to the boss, "we really need to update this ancient equipment, it will save up a lot of money in just a few years" should be enough. No, the only thing that makes much sense is someone standing in the way of the logical choice. And if it is the boss he isn't being well advised.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
One of my first engineering jobs was programming an old milling machine. You wrote the program code in an editor on a computer, then had it output on a roll of punched paper tape. The code was punched into the tape transversely, in simple 8-bit ASCII. Hanging chads would really ruin your day.
My big contribution was a program that could punch a human readable header onto the tape. Written in the finest QBASIC.
- Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity.
punchcards + hurricane == funny