In 1969, I went to work for Gulf Oil Canada in Toronto in the Forecasts & Analysis Department. I was 18 years old and had done some programming at the University of Waterloo. With only 10 people, our department was miniscule compared to the accounting department which took up three full floors in our building.

In those days, if you bought gas at a Gulf station with a credit card, the transaction was recorded at the station onto an IBM punched card. Tens of thousands of these cards made their way to our building every day, and this army of people worked to process this mountain of card stock. On one floor, rows upon rows of key punches created an almost deafening din of noise. It was sheer bedlam.

Gulf was in the process of phasing out their older IBM punched card equipment and had recently installed a brand new IBM 360 mainframe. It was a stylish, bright blue mainframe with sharp modern right angles. The beast sat in a glass walled "sanctuary" on a raised floor so not a single wire was to be seen. The old machines were monster-sized clunkers that had been relegated to a large, dimly-lit room. On the floor was a tangle of electrical cables. Unlike the sleek IBM 360, these dusty, old machines were all the same ugly dark grey colour complete with art deco, rounded corners from the 1930s. They even smelled old from the machine oil used to keep them from becoming piles of metal dust.

I was fascinated by these clunkers. Some of these relics were still being used to verify the punched cards before they went into the computer room. As a programmer, I was amazed that my predecessors had able to create entire data processing systems without using a computer.

I would never have used any of this equipment, except I had some simple needs for data analysis and was not able to get computer time allocated soon enough. So, I talked to some of the old timers who ran the old equipment and discovered that I could do a lot of neat stuff without using a computer at all. Although I went on to developing software for mainframes, minicomputers, embedded processors, PCs, and eventually web servers, I've always been fascinated by the history of some of the old equipment.

These articles discuss the advances made between Herman Hollerith's invention of the Tabulator in 1892 and the beginning of the 1950s when general purpose computers made their first appearance.