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.

Ms Fx was also at the cutting edge being a skilled Accounting Machine Operator.

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.

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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).

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.