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

Posted by timothy on 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.

8 of 289 comments (clear)

  1. Debugging that... by icebike · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.
    1. Re:Debugging that... by greyparrot · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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!

  2. The manager's moto by Dancindan84 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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
  3. Re:If it ain't broke... by 0racle · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The problem with that can end up being "when it is broke, how are you going to fix it?"

    --
    "I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
  4. 026 by Peter+Simpson · · Score: 5, Informative

    That's an 026 keypunch he's leaning on, not a 129.

  5. Re:I used to write programs in PL1/PLC on punch ca by Peter+Simpson · · Score: 5, Informative

    Drawing a diagonal line across the top of the deck is faster and lets you insert cards without having to resequence.,..

  6. Re:So i wonder how this was discovered? by greyparrot · · Score: 5, Funny

    I found one (or two) of these once as part of a study. The old M-- H-- bank was going to replace some important system, and I was on the illustrious crew of analysts documenting all its interfaces. One of them was a deck of cards that was output at the end of the run. So very early one morning I followed it from the output room to the mail room, and then the wagon to an office, where the cards were placed on the desk of the person who ran that machine. She and her young assistant ran them through the machine, which duplicated them and added some columns, probably totals of some kind. Then they took the new deck and loaded it into another of the same sort of machine, programmed differently. It read the cards and printed a report. Then she put a rubber band around the report and cards, and it went back on the mail cart. I followed it down the hall and to another floor, where it arrived on someone's desk.
    And...
    He picked it up and threw it into the trash.
    When I wrote it up, nobody wanted to believe me.

  7. Re:So i wonder how this was discovered? by rgbscan · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's funny how those things persist. Years ago, I took over a mainframe data processing department. Every month I would be sent a fan-fold report on that old school tractor fed paper that took up a whole copy paper box. It literally was a 50 pound report. I had no idea what it was for, nor did anyone else. It went straight into the shredder. Every month a new bundle would show up. I sent it straight to the shredder. Didn't even look at it. The box came interoffice mail with no return address and there wasn't any identifying information on the report for me to figure out where it came from or how to get it shut off. Not even a report identifier I could look for in the mainframe. I can't imagine how much time, paper, and impact printer ribbon went into it. I mean, how would you even look for anything on that report? Kept coming every month for the whole 4 years I managed that department. I hear it finally and mysteriously, stopped showing up a year or two ago. The new manager has no explanation for it's demise but it was a good thing. /Shrug