![]() ![]() Citibank had a bunch of unhappy customers. The cause didn’t matter - the problem was now Citibank had 500 ATMs that were down. Reliability problems were caused partly by hardware failures and partly by software bugs. It was a big problem when the inevitable crash happened. If the customer wanted to withdraw cash from his checking account she could do it from the ATM and never have to go into a branch. For example, Citibank in New York City had a network of 500 ATMs all connected to a central mainframe computer that held customer account information. If they could get people use these ATMs for simple banking transactions they could get away with fewer employees and maybe even close down some branches. In the early 1970s banks began installing them as way to save money. Companies began to use computers in applications where the ultimate user was connected directly to it. In the late 60s and early 70s things began to change. The person that picked up the bundle of checks never knew. The problem would be fixed by the operator or service engineer, the computer would be rebooted, and the payroll program would be rerun. If perhaps during the operation the computer failed – and they failed pretty often back then – the payroll person never knew it. A great way for big companies to cut costs. This was how almost everybody used computers - no one actually touched them.Īs computers moved into the commercial world during the 1960s one of the most frequent applications was calculating and printing payroll checks. I would do it again and wait another day for the results. More often than not I made some stupid error in one of the first cards and the whole effort was wasted. ![]() I would punch up bunch of cards, place them in a cubbyhole, and come back the next day to get the results. (He couldn’t stand all the free publicity that UNIVAC was getting.) I was taking a math class and had to learn FORTRAN, the world’s first high level programming language. The mysterious giant brain that predicted the presidential election in the 50s, and forced Tom Watson of IBM to finally get serious about the business. I entered the computing room and there it was! Out of reach behind a glass wall. It was actually a pretty awe-inspiring moment for me. The first computer I ever saw was an IBM 1620 at San Jose State in 1963. The computer user never touched or even laid eyes on the “brain”. At some point during the next 24 hours or so the operator would feed these cards into the computer, it would execute the job and print the results, and the operator would place the output back in the same cubbyhole. In the ‘50s and most of the ‘60s computers were used in what was called “batch processing.” The inputs into the computer, usually in the form of punched cards, were placed in a cubbyhole in a room somewhere in its vicinity. This was all done by hand until computers came along. Those guys obviously never saw the computer that produced all information that allowed them to point these guns in the proper direction, adjust the elevation for distance, factor in wind, humidity, etc. One of their earliest uses was during World War II to compute range tables for the soldiers shooting giant guns. In the early history of computing, the user – the ultimate recipient of its work - never saw the thing. Of course they crash all the time - they’re computers, and computers break!!! ![]() Just a few years earlier when I worked for Data General I listened to my boss tell the CEO of Hyster (the fork lift company) to calm down - stop complaining about the Novas that we were selling them. Computer systems were notoriously unreliable - people expected them to “break”. In the early ’80s my pitch almost always caused a chuckle or laugh. My elevator pitch for Stratus was: “We make computers that don’t break.” I thought it was perfect - short and sweet. ![]()
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