IBMWatson autobiographythoughts on 765

The computer might do the job X times faster than the sorter, but if a computer minute cost more than X sorter minutes pre-sorting was a good idea.

In the late 1960's my college started converting a lot of their administrative applications from a tab operation to the shiny new S-360. The conversion was perhaps not the most efficient that could be imagined:

OLD: Run deck of cards through sorter, then run the sorted deck through the tabulator using plugboard B.

NEW: Read deck of cards into computer, run sort utility, punch sorted deck. Then read sorted deck back into computer and run report program B.

We referred sneeringly to this approach and its inventor "One RPG program equals one plugboard."

Eventually, the Director of the computer center got the authority to set rates for this'n'that: so much per CPU minute, so much per line printed, and so on. The crucial item looked quite innocent: one cent per card punched (justified by the relatively slow speed of the punch compared to pretty much everything else). When the next set of monthly bills went out, the howls from the academic side were deafening ... and we finally got them to implement our long-standing suggestion of "punching" all those intermediate decks onto card-image mag tape.

Money -- even "Monopoly money" -- talks.

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