A Woman’s Place Is In The Computer.
Posted by Jacques Chester on Tuesday, July 1, 2008
A fascinating tale of the very early days when calculations were done with slide rules and log tables, a ‘computer’ meant ‘female employee with a calculator’, and why Visicalc was not always destined to be the first computerised spreadsheet.
John said, “Well, I’ve developed a computer program that works the same way. All you have to do is to define the formulas for each column of the spreadsheet and give the data. The computer does the calculations just like the computer ladies used to do and gives you a printout that looks just like a spreadsheet. I think it’ll be just the ticket for those people who don’t know how to program in FORTRAN. It will open up the use of computers to lots more people.”
I thought about it for all of 30 seconds, and said, “John, that’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard.”
Added: Speaking of VisiCalc, it turns out that you can still download it from creator Dan Bricklin’s website.
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““John, that’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard.”
Well at least he has the distinction of being the first in the world to channel Bill Gates, and at a time when Bill must have been all of 6 years old.
Although it is a somewhat ambiguous distinction.
Posted on 01-Jul-08 at 6:31 pm | PermalinkProminent users of these manual “computers” were the TABs in Australia and New Zealand. (The first of these was established in New Zealand in 1950, long before there was any prospect of using electronic computers for collating, although as early as 1913 mechanical totalisators were being used for collation of on-course betting.) In the days of manual collation, each TAB branch or agency would collate its bets on a race when betting closed shortly before the start, then phone the collated figures in to a central location, where a room full of women with wide carriage adding machines (like the Friden in Jacques’ linked article) would perform the master collation for the race. This provided odds on each horse, and subsequently the dividend when the result was announced.
I was able to watch this process at the last manually collated Melbourne Cup at the South Australian TAB in, I think, November 1977. From memory that was the first day that more than 2 million bets were placed. The TAB had tried replacing the mechanical machines with electronic calculators, but the women found that they were too slow. They had mastered the art of touch typing while being able to chat to one another and very rarely made a mistake. (There were checking processes in place to pick up mistakes before they affected the dividend calculations.)
Migration from manual systems to online real-time began at the NSW TAB somewhere in the mid-1960s, where the software engineers (long before they were called that) constructed one of the first fault-tolerant computers in the world by bolting together two System/360 Model 44 machines and writing the necessary software.
A breakthrough in automation came in the mid 1970s when a joint effort by the Western Australian TAB and IBM Canada produced the first online mark sense card reading and printing terminals, transferring data entry responsibility to the TAB customers and eliminating scope for TAB agency staff errors in the process.
The net effect of these developments was a stunning reduction in TAB staff numbers. This was documented in one of the papers prepared for the 1989 Myers Inquiry into Technological Change in Australia (unfortunately, unavailable online).
Posted on 02-Jul-08 at 9:12 am | Permalinktest
Posted on 02-Jul-08 at 10:52 am | PermalinkError!
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Posted on 02-Jul-08 at 11:08 am | PermalinkMake sure your Internet connection is active and check whether other applications that rely on the same connection are working.
jacques - whenever I try to post more than a para I get this message - clearly no one else does - I have it both from IE and Opera. Weird.
Posted on 02-Jul-08 at 11:10 am | PermalinkIt’s those ladies, FX, you’ve done something to annoy them, or something.
Posted on 02-Jul-08 at 1:25 pm | PermalinkThey’re getting cramped.
Posted on 02-Jul-08 at 3:02 pm | PermalinkNostalgia ain’t what it used to be. For some reason I learnt to use a slide rule - can’t imagine why. I used to punch holes in cardboard computer cards with a knitting needle.
I was excited by the possibility of the democratisation of computing heralded by the Osborne luggable my boss sleazed out of some research grant or other. My ground breaking efforts in this field consisted of lugging it home one weekend and with the aid of an acoustic coupler connecting into the mainframe at the Uni. I think I then played a text based game.
Posted on 02-Jul-08 at 5:19 pm | PermalinkI notice the same guy who has the picture of the Osborne also has an Amstrad portable - I still have mine AND it still works. The Amstrad was far ahead of its time having a built in modem.
Ms Fx was also at the cutting edge being a skilled Accounting Machine Operator.
Posted on 02-Jul-08 at 5:20 pm | PermalinkThat’s not a slide rule!
THIS is a slide rule:
http://www.hpmuseum.org/srcyl.htm
My team of comptometrists, using Burroughs accounting machines, were replaced by CDC 3600 mainframe applications around 1967-68.
You bring to mind the precursor of VisiCalc/Excel that we built at CBCS in 1970-71, and used to generate the entire Quarterly National Accounts Estimates publication. Using punch cards on Control Data 3500 mainframe.
Statistics Canada was running a similar user-driven system, CANSIM, in 1972 on IBM 370.
I still remember laughing, later on, when I found how much of that same stuff I could do with VisiCalc on my Trash-80.
Those were the days.
Posted on 02-Jul-08 at 10:24 pm | Permalink