I worked on a Lockheed project about 10 years ago where all of the exterior surface data for many of the old airplanes (C5, P3, C-130, etc.) was still on IBM punch cards. in order to cut a section, they had to look up the approx. coordinates of each individual surface in one system, which would tell them what set of punch cards to obtain (there was a whole wall full of punch card cabinets). They would then get the punch cards, load them in another machine, which would read the cards, load the mathematics into a special program which would calculate the curve and translate it into CADAM. There were 3 guys who knew how to extract the data, and two of them were in their 70s. Source code long long long gone. As a point of reference, the C-130 was developed on paper in the 40s. I don't know when the program was developed, but the computers they were running on, looked like they came out of the 50s themselves, and I've seen enough old computers to know.
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I worked on a Lockheed project about 10 years ago where all of the exterior surface data for many of the old airplanes (C5, P3, C-130, etc.) was still on IBM punch cards. in order to cut a section, they had to look up the approx. coordinates of each individual surface in one system, which would tell them what set of punch cards to obtain (there was a whole wall full of punch card cabinets). They would then get the punch cards, load them in another machine, which would read the cards, load the mathematics into a special program which would calculate the curve and translate it into CADAM. There were 3 guys who knew how to extract the data, and two of them were in their 70s. Source code long long long gone. As a point of reference, the C-130 was developed on paper in the 40s. I don't know when the program was developed, but the computers they were running on, looked like they came out of the 50s themselves, and I've seen enough old computers to know.