| In 1958, I was hired as a data processing trainee for Simplex Wire & Cable Co., in Cambridge, Mass. The company covered ten city blocks. At that time it owned one electronic calculator. This was two machines that weighed about a ton - the card reader/punch was about seven feet wide, four feet tall and two feet deep; the memory, such as it was, was the size of a six-foot file cabinet. We programmed it by plugging wires into a control panel to complete circuits. It could carry out sixteen consecutive steps, and punch the results into the card. It accomplished all of the data processing needs for this large corporation. |