http://www.righto.com/2017/04/1950s-tax-preparation-plugboard.html
This is quite an amazing electro-mechanical device which uses relays, switches, and cogs to produce reports which were output on to punch cards. The punch cards were then entered into an another plug-board machine to print out the information. Each punch card contains a record, so a stack of punch cards is basically a database.
The plug-boards were setup to perform a specific function., and were programmed by connecting the wires between various parts of the board to turn on a switch, or line to build the queries and output the data. It's a pretty neat machine and being a technician, I can only imagine what it was like to repair these machines. They were produced between the late 1940s to the 1960s.
Anyway, this stuff is cool and it shows how far we've come from the punch card days, and the electro-mechanical computing devices of the early days.
This is quite an amazing electro-mechanical device which uses relays, switches, and cogs to produce reports which were output on to punch cards. The punch cards were then entered into an another plug-board machine to print out the information. Each punch card contains a record, so a stack of punch cards is basically a database.
The plug-boards were setup to perform a specific function., and were programmed by connecting the wires between various parts of the board to turn on a switch, or line to build the queries and output the data. It's a pretty neat machine and being a technician, I can only imagine what it was like to repair these machines. They were produced between the late 1940s to the 1960s.
Anyway, this stuff is cool and it shows how far we've come from the punch card days, and the electro-mechanical computing devices of the early days.