Programming using a plug-board - an IBM 403 Plugboard Accounting Machine

JCitron

Trainzing since 12-2003
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.
 
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.
It was great fun when the IBM tech called in to run his diagnostics, which was a plugboard that he carried everywhere and a matching deck of cards. He could really make the machine dance. The best one was the printer, which raised all the type bars to the same point and stopped them all at the same time. The system I was most familiar with was installed in the offices of a very large steel manufacturing plant, and a 403 running its print diagnostics caused a racket that was comparable with any of the other heavy equipment on site!
 
We were still using Hollerith punch cards in the early 80's so they were around for a while. Our Univac card reader must have been hungry because it often ate my cards!
 
Sometimes I think that the sudden switch from vaaccuumm tubes and solid state electronics, to today's micro processors, were developed by aliens, who came to Earth and said: "Doods, That's not the way it is done, you got to put these POS in a museum, and get with the modern times"

When I was young, a Transistor radio, and a reel to reel tape recorder, were the only high tech devices ... With my trusty magnifying glass I could burn up red any colonies with glee (as we had no shoot em' up video games to occupy our time), and with my trusty Dad's claw hammer, and borrowed (confiscated) untold box's of nails, we killed many a tree, by building 3 story wooden tree forts, and camped out in the limbs all night ... We had nothing back then ... Nothing !
 
I worked for Univac – Unisys from 1964 to 1985. I saw the transition from the plug board, card readers and huge disc drives made from concrete pipes to what we have today. My first 40Meg hard drive was the talk of the town, LOL. I added a second one to my computer and said I would never use up all that space. Now you cannot load programs in that space.
 
Thank you all for sharing thoughts. I find it fascinating to hear of people here that used or were around what sounds to me to be really cool, but beastly devices.

I can well imagine the racket these things produced when they were busily pushing through a stack of Hollerith cards. When I worked in a computer room, we had big DEC line printers which used a band and hammer type heads, and these printers were not so quiet as they banged away against the metal typewriter type band and smashed the ink ribbon on to the paper.

It really is amazing how far the technology has come from data being stored on cards to the similar data now stored as bits on some kind ferromagnetic or silicon type substrate, and all much, much smaller with far larger capacity than could be imagined at the time. I too had a couple of 40 MB drives, which where the hugest drives we had for the longest time. When I went up to 550 MB, I too thought I wouldn't need anymore than that, and today we have single programs which are that size.

This makes me wonder too what the world would be like today if we stayed at this technology. Would some hacker slip in an erroneous card into the punch-card stack to wreak havoc with someone's data? That to me is not implausible, but surely quite difficult to do without being caught unlike today where someone in another country can write malware that infects systems elsewhere, or worse worldwide. This is the price we pay for what we gain from the convenience and ease of use of computer technology today.
 
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