Working in the computing field in the 1960's

In my autobiography I briefly mentioned the first summer that I worked in the computer field and the job I had working for Uniroyal.  I’d like to expand on that and give some perspective of what the industry was like back in 1968.

The prior two years I had worked for Service Tire, recapping truck tires.  It was hot, dirty work.  By working 55 hours a week, with time-and-a-half for overtime, I made $100 a week (before taxes) at the princely sum of $1.50/hour.  While $100 a week certainly helped with earning money for college, I needed to do better the next summer as my funds were running low.

A friend from my parents’ church, Fred Benedict, had a job as a systems analyst for Uniroyal at their Eastern Management Information Center (EMIC) in Naugatuck – adjacent to the US Rubber and US Chemical plants (two of Uniroyal’s divisions).  Fred’s position was at the top of the chain for non-managerial positions as he actually had a degree.  Although they had never had a summer student work at EMIC, upon his recommendation they agreed to give me a try.

Degrees actually in Computer Science were quite rare in those days.  Most people working in the field had come from some other area and if they had degrees, which most did not, they were in other disciplines.  Fred and the department manager, Roy Peterson, were the exception.  Roy’s degree was in math and I believe Fred’s was in business.  The other people in the department had come from other areas in the company and had experience in that part of the business.  For example, the fellow who supported the payroll systems had been a “tab operator” [more on that later] in the department and the fellow who supported their production systems had been a production scheduler previously.  The latter had just earned his associate degree and was working on a degree in the evening (something that he was justly proud of as he also was a married man with several kids).

In order to see if people had what it took to work in the field you couldn’t rely on education or past experience, as so few people had that.  Instead IBM had developed a test, the IBM Programming Aptitude Test (IBM-PAT) that tested reasoning ability, logical thinking, etc.  Since everyone else in the department at Uniroyal had taken it, it was reasonable that they gave it to me before offering me a job.

The IBM-PAT was like a mini-SAT in that there were a number of timed sections.  The questions were all multiple choice.  I remember some of the sections were math-type word problems (that could be worked out in your head or in the margins), choose the next item in a series, choose the one that didn’t belong, etc.  Roy’s secretary set me up in a vacant office, gave me one section, checked her watch, and said she’d back when my time was up for that section.  However, these kinds of tests have always been easy for me and I breezed through them very quickly.  I was back at her desk almost before she had a chance to sit down, asking for the next section.

After I finished the last section, I went in to Roy’s office so he could interview me while his secretary graded all the sections.  I not only shocked him with how fast I finished the test, but I had outscored everyone else in the department who had ever taken the test.  There was no question that he wanted to hire me for the summer.  My pay was going to be $500 a month.  That worked out to about $3.00 an hour, double what I had been making at Service Tire.  But of course I wasn’t going to be working 55 hour weeks so it was only about 25% more total income.  That was fine with me as I was also planning on taking two evening classes at Central Connecticut State College so I could stay on track to graduate in three years instead of four.

I estimate that starting salaries in the Computer Department at Uniroyal began at $8000/year or less for a programmer up to $10,000+ for a systems analyst (there were three job titles – programmer, programmer/analyst, and systems analyst).  I know that when I started full-time with them a few years later that with two master’s degrees I was making $12,000 a year.  So my summer salary at the equivalent of $6000/year was about ¾ of a regular employee – pretty good I thought.

I won’t go into what my programming job was for the summer (if you want to see, you’ll have to buy my autobiography), but I want to discuss a little of what the computing profession was back then.

Prior to the introduction of computers in business, companies had what were called “tab” (short for tabulation) departments that operated using punched cards and equipment that processed them.  IBM (or International Business Machines back then) sold keypunches (IBM-026), interpreters, sorters, and accounting machines.  The IBM-401 accounting machine was introduced in the 1930’s and the latest one, the IBM-407, was introduced in 1949 and continued to be sold until the mid-1970’s (I used one in college).  IBM first business computer, the IBM-1401 came out in the late 1950’s.  The printer for this unit, the IBM-1403 continued to be used for a couple of decades.  The 1401 only ran a single program at a time and it was used primarily for “unit record” processing, i.e. reading in decks of cards and outputting either cards or printed reports.  They also had tape drives.  Memory maximum was 16K.  Programming was either using Autocoder or COBOL.  (The job that Uniroyal originally intended for me that summer was converting their remaining Autocoder programs to COBOL.)

In 1964, IBM introduced the IBM-360 line of computers.  Although this was only four years later, in the summer of 1968, Uniroyal had several of these computers in their computer room.  The computer room occupied the center of the building and had a glass wall on the south end of the room so visitors could see into the room and be impressed by it.  The executive offices were on that end of the building as well.  The computer department itself was on the north end.  As a major corporation, Uniroyal had three computers, all IBM-360’s, a model 30, a model 40, and a model 50.  EMIC was probably one of the largest, if not the largest, collection of IBM-360’s in the city.  The model 50 had 256K – a massive amount of memory at the time, since main memory was approximately $1MM a megabyte.  So the memory alone on their model 50 was $250,000 – or the equivalent of 25 systems analysts!

For the first two weeks of my new job, I went through their standard training program.  That meant that I spent the time in the computer room as an operator assistant – loading in cards, separating printed output, retrieving the appropriate tapes from the tape library and loading them onto the tape drives when required, etc.  They also had four IBM-2311 disk drives.  These had removable disk packs.  The drives were slightly smaller than a washing machine and cost about $25k each.  The disk packs were 14” in diameter, weighed 10 pounds each, and held the magnificent total of 7 megabytes of data.  When you compare that to computers today those were large in size, small in capacity, and VERY pricy!

In later years I came to appreciate that training program.  By seeing how an operator needed to interact with a program, how one could save time by having an output tape from one program remain on the same tape drive for the next program to read, etc., it meant that I could design my programs and systems for ease of running – making the operators my friends. 

I remember one day I had just loaded a new box of paper in the printer and the cover was still up as I walked toward the other end of the room.  The operator the prior shift had made a replacement tape for the printer (they had a loop of heavy paper with the channel punches in it that was made special for different kinds of forms (invoices, checks, etc.)).  The specifications for that tape noted which channels were used and how far apart they were to be spaced.  The operator had not put any holes in the channels that were not used by that form.  But the programmer had made a change and forgot to tell us.  When the program started printing and it gave a command to jump to the new channel, there was no hole in the tape anywhere on that loop, so the printer just kept spewing paper as the loop went around and around searching for a hole in the column.  Since I had just loaded a new box, the first page went sailing straight up and hit the ceiling before coming back down and making a pile of paper on the floor.  Before we could get to the printer and turn it off, we had a half a box of paper spewed on the floor.  We just gathered it up and carried it to the dumpster.  We also made a new operational procedure that all printer tape loops would have a hole punched for EVERY channel at the bottom of the page to avoid future mishaps of this type!

After my training weeks, I began the real work of programming on the assignment I was given for the summer.  But working in a real business environment instead of the academic environment of the university was quite a change – and one that helped prepare me for the next several decades in the computing field.