
1950's tax preparation: plugboard programming with an IBM 403 Accounting Machine - franzb
http://www.righto.com/2017/04/1950s-tax-preparation-plugboard.html
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Finnucane
Back in the 1980s I worked for a guy who wrote accounting systems, mainly in
COBOL for Wang VS systems, which were still a thing at the time. One of our
clients had an old plugboard system--we were helping them replace it. There
was one person left at the company who knew how to run it, and no one who knew
how to program the plugboards. If anything happened to the boards, they were
SOL.

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mrbill
Sparkler Filters [1] in Conroe, TX is still using an IBM 402 for daily
operations and bookkeeping.

[1]
[http://ibm-1401.info/402.html#SparkleFilters](http://ibm-1401.info/402.html#SparkleFilters)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxCZ35y3O04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxCZ35y3O04)

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zeteo
Although not designed for it, old-school punched card machines were capable of
pretty sophisticated computations. Here's a tidbit from Richard Feynman [1] on
the crucial part played by IBM machines in the Manhattan Project circa 1945.
They had even implemented a form of pipeline parallelism:

> Anyway we decided that the big problem--which was to figure out exactly what
> happened during the bomb's implosion, so you can figure out exactly how much
> energy was released and so on--required much more calculating than we were
> capable of. A clever fellow by the name of Stanley Frankel realized that it
> could possibly he done on IBM machines. The IBM company had machines for
> business purposes, adding machines called tabulators for listing sums, and a
> multiplier that you put cards in and it would take two numbers from a card
> and multiply them. There were also collators and sorters and so on.

> So Frankel figured out a nice program. If we got enough of these machines in
> a room, we could take the cards and put them through a cycle. Everybody who
> does numerical calculations now knows exactly what I'm talking about, but
> this was kind of a new thing then--mass production with machines. We had
> done things like this on adding machines. Usually you go one step across,
> doing everything yourself. But this was different--where you go first to the
> adder, then to the multiplier, then to the adder, and so on. So Frankel
> designed this system and ordered the machines from the IBM company because
> we realized it was a good way of solving our problems. [...]

> But one of the secret ways we did our problems was this. The problems
> consisted of a bunch of cards that had to go through a cycle. First add,
> then multiply--and so it went through the cycle of machines in this room,
> slowly, as it went around and around. So we figured a way to put a different
> colored set of cards through a cycle too, but out of phase. We'd do two or
> three problems at a time. [...]

> As the cards went through, sometimes the machine made a mistake, or they put
> a wrong number in. What we used to have to do when that happened was to go
> back and do it over again. But they noticed that a mistake made at some
> point in one cycle only affects the nearby numbers, the next cycle affects
> the nearby numbers, and so on. It works its way through the pack of cards.
> If you have fifty cards and you make a mistake at card number thirty-nine,
> it affects thirty-seven, thirty-eight, and thirty-nine. The next, card
> thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, and forty. The next
> time it spreads like a disease. So they found an error back a way, and they
> got an idea. They would only compute a small deck of ten cards around the
> error. And because ten cards could he put through the machine faster than
> the deck of fifty cards, they would go rapidly through with this other deck
> while they continued with the fifty cards with the disease spreading. But
> the other thing was computing faster, and they would seal it all up and
> correct it. Very clever.

[1] "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", Los Alamos chapter

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dom0
> Long before computers existed, businesses used electromechanical accounting
> machines for data processing.

The term "computer" \-- referring to either an organism carrying out
computations or a machine doing the same -- predates our modern concept of
"computer" \-- what we think of instantaneously when reading the word -- by
many (or some, depending on _your_ concept of "computer") decades.

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kens
The title should be "1950s tax preparation", of course.

~~~
dang
Sorry! Fixed.

p.s. This is a great article.

