Wednesdays are always the days when our domestic help calls around and we are always very pleased to see her. After a couple of wet days, we are hopeful to have a somewhat better spell of weather midweek.
Yesterday, just about sixty years ago, I started work as a Scientific Assistant in the National lending Library for Science and Technology at Boston Spa in Yorkshire. Fortunately, I had a scooter to get to work but if you had to rely on buses to get to work it was always a bit of a nightmare because I needed to catch one bus into Leeds, another to Wetherby and then a third to the outskirts of Boston Spa. If you were two minutes late for the first bus and missed it, you could end up being two hours late at the other end. For the first year at the National Lending Library (known to us all as ‘Nellie’ after the initials NLL) I worked in the ‘Acquisitions’ section where we obtained scientific literature from all over the world either being provided free (typically by the Americans), purchased from many of the European countries or exchanged for similar literature from USSR and the Iron Curtain countries. These exchange relationships were a way of avoiding currency restrictions and worked quite well although the Russians had a different view of what constituted ‘science’ (e.g. the collected works of Marx and Lenin) than we regarded as ‘science’ in the west. In my second year, I worked in the rather quaintly called ‘Machine Recording’ section although nowadays we would call this a data processing section or even just IT. But then the technology that we worked with to generate a multiplicity of library records was a very ancient punch-card operated IBM printer, designed in the late 1940’s and remarkably error prone by 1963. We used to generate cards for each periodical using an IBM punched card system sometimes known as Hollerith cards. Punched card tabulating equipment, invented and developed by Herman Hollerith to process data from the United States Census of 1890, was the first mechanized means for compiling and analyzing statistical information. Through continual improvements, first by Hollerith and then by many others, punched card equipment created and expanded the worldwide information processing industry and continued to play a significant role in that industry for more than two decades after the first commercial electronic computers were installed in the early 1950s. Each card was eighty columns wide and each column was numbered 0-9. But by using two zones at the top of the card, you could generate an alphanumeric set of data by punching two or three more holes in each column. This technology had the advantage that it was both machine and also human readable as when the card was produced, the corresponding character was written along the very top edge. The cards were manufactured with a distinctive notch in the top corner so that you could tell at a glance if the cards were all the right way round. So we spent a lot of time on the card punch which might quite a pleasant clattering sound and in which the card was advanced along under the keyboard/hole cutting edge until it got flipped into a stack at the end of the machine. To go along with this, we had a card sorting machine which evidently read the ‘holes’ in each card and deposited the card into the relevant bin. But you could only sort on one column at a time which meant that a sort within a sort could be quite a tedious affair. Finally, we came to the heart of the system which was an ancient IBM machine, possibly the IBM 407 which could be ‘programmed’ by means of a plug board. The ‘program’ if you could actually call it that was a board some 12″ x 15″ with a mass of wires all over it and depending upon the instructions that you fed into it, would ascertain what part of the punched card fed into the machine was to be printed out and in what order. This we used to generate a multiplicity of library records (e.g. all of the new acquisitions within the last month) on sheets of computer paper. There were three of us in the department, myself and a fellow Scientific Assistant and our boss who was a 28 year old with a fairly laissez-faire attitude and we all had a play around with the system according to our likes. Our boss, Peter, I think secretly loved playing about with the plug boards (as you had one for each of the particular types of record produced and they often needed tweaking) My co-worker was a great fan of the singer Jim Reeves and produced all kinds of catalogues of every one of his recorded songs. As I remember it, I produced invitations to an 18th birthday party and Peter, our Boss, was always seemed to be having a play with the thing. The equipment was often prone to failure and the IBM engineers often had to pore over the various machine with a manual and a circuit diagram to sort out the malfunctioning. However, I think this probably gave me my first taste of what one might call ‘real’ computing which love I have never really lost. We had frequent groups of visitors around her work area, some of them technical and some of them from the local community. Our boss was away one day a week doing a part-time qualification called a Diploma in Technology (precursor to a degree) and myself any my colleagues use to work like demons all day on a Friday leaving some time at the end of the day to be visited by a couple of the girls who worked elsewhere in the library in a section known as ‘Kalamazoo’ after the binders in which the periodicals were recorded as they arrived. The library was organised in a series of old munitions stores and the ‘Machine Recording’ section was in the third of these buildings called ‘C’ store and the girls who visited us always had a piece of paper in their hand which justified their visit to our work area so that something could be ‘checked’ This occasionally gave rise to a succession of teenage frolics the details of which I will not go into at this point except to mention that we were in deep frolic mode at one point of time with the girls sitting in receptacles known as ‘coffins’ put upon the table and showing all of their stocking tops (with the word ‘CANCELLED’ stamped on each thigh) when in walked the Standing Committee on National University Libraries leaving me to explain the situation (my mate saw what was about to happen and kept on walking leaving me to cope with the situation as best I could)