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Introduction

This is the story of my journey to a career in computers and then to building websites in retirement.  This will not interest everyone because many of you will not remember the days of IBM cards and one of the earlier methods of electronic reporting.  I was lucky enough to get to experience this earlier methods and to see where it is today.

Where did it all start?

I started out working as a Clerk Typist at Scott AFB the day after graduating from Belleville Township High School. I worked in a Training Aids Supply area and among other duties, I typed up inventory reports.  One day a Technical Sargeant came in to the office with a stack of cards and would write information from our supply area or from my typed inventory listing onto the cards.  As time went on, he would return with some of the cards and now the cards had holes punched in them.  He would continue coming to the office and record information on the cards - how many items on hand, on order, etc.  Being curious about this process, one day I asked him what he was doing and what he was going to do with the cards.

IBM Cards

The sargeant informed me that the cards were called IBM cards and he showed me that each card contained the item number, description of the item, where it was located in the supply room, how many were on hand, on order, or on back-order.  I asked what he did with the cards and how they got the holes in them. 

Accounting Machines

He took me to the accounting machine room area where the cards were placed in a 'key punch machine'.  The key punch operator would type the information from my inventory listing, like on a typewriter, only into cards rather than paper. After the cards were punched, they were passed to another operator who would put them in a 'Verifier' machine and that operator would type the same information into the same card.  If this operator typed something different than what the key punch operator had typed into the card, the verifier machine would ding and put a mark in the column where the differences occurred.  Then they would have to manually verify what was the correct entry and punch a corrected card.

After the key punch operators/verifiers were satisfied that all of the cards were correct in the 'batch', they passed the cards on to the accounting area to prepare reports.

How do we get reports?

Depending upon what kind of report they needed to produce, these people would take the cards to a 'sorter' and sort them on whatever columns contained the controlling information for the report.  For example, if the report was simply to print a listing of all inventory, and a report by item description was required, the sorter operator may sort all of the cards on the columns that contained the description.  If a part number report was needed, the sorter operator would sort the cards on the columns containing the part number.  For each kind of report, the cards had to be sorted to fit the need.

In order to print the report, the operator had to 'wire' an accounting machine board to match each column that was to be printed on the report, also had special wiring for accumulating totals, sub-totals, control by date, each date to a new page, etc..  This all caught my attention and I became very interested in following this in my career.

At this time, however, the government was not training civilians for work in this field.

Where will I work?

I decided to find a place where I could learn more about this job field.  I continued to work my day job at Scott AFB, and enrolled in evening classes at Manpower Training Center in St Louis Missouri where I mastered the 'accounting machines' which included the key punch, verifier, sorter, collator, and accounting machines.

Now even though I mastered the machines and graduated from the training, Scott AFB would not hire me in the field.  I searched for a government job where I could get involved in the IBM Accounting Machine area.  I found a job at the Veterans Administration.  Then one day the VA moved an IBM 360 Computer into our shop.  It would read the cards at record speed and there were no 'boards' to wire.  The IBM 360 was 'programmed' to sort and run reports just by feeding them into the machine.  Now I wanted to know how to program that machine.  I sought training again and qualified for a position as an RPG Programmer.


COBOL

I was in a car pool with the a man who ran the computer department for Farmer's Home Administration (FHA), another government agency that was located in our building on a different floor.  He knew of my interest in the computer area and specifically programming and he told me one day that he had openings for main-frame COBOL programmers if I was interested in retraining.  I applied for and got a position with FHA.  I was immediately entered into their COBOL training program and after 2 weeks of training, I was working as a COBOL programmer.

Programmers were given instructions for a report that was needed.  We had to write the code to produce the report on 'code sheets'.  Each line on the code sheet would contain one line of instruction.  After completing the code sheet, we took the code sheet to the key punch area and waited for our 'code' to be punched into the IBM cards.  Once verified, we would pick up our deck of cards and schedule a time for the computer operator to 'test' our code by running it on the main-frame computer.  We would get one test run.  If it didn't work the way we wanted it, we had to pick up our cards and re-think the problem and rewrite the instruction(s).  Now back to the key punch room for the corrected card(s), and repeat the process for testing.

This was a Boroughs Computer filled an entire room, had to have constant air conditioning and the total memory of the machine was probably less than what a cell phone contains today.

My career was put on hold at this point because I decided to get married and move to Southern Illinois.  Fourteen months later we had a little girl.  At the same time our daughter was ready to start school, our church opened a church school.  We enrolled our daughter in the church school and I volunteered to work in the school.


TRS-80

The school purchased a TRS-80  Radio Shack computer and I found myself still interested in computers.  Now computers are coming into our homes.  I was the secretary for our church and could see how a computer would benefit us so we purchased a computer for our home and I used it to computerize the financial records for our church.

When my husband got ill, he wanted me to get a 'paying' job so I could take care of the family should something happen to him.  There was not much opportunity for work in the small town where we lived so I thought I'd go back to where I was last employed and see what the computer programming field was doing.

I was amazed to see that the programmers were no longer writing code sheets and punching cards but were programming directly into the main frame computer from their desktop computers.  I was hooked again!

Back to school

I went back to my Area College to see what was offered in this field.  Liking what I saw, I enrolled as a full-time student in the Data Processing program.  In 1989 I graduated with High Honors (GPA 3.65 based on 4.0), a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and with an Associate of Science Degree in Data Processing.

After graduation I obtained employment in the Data Processing area of Magna Bank in Belleville Illinois.  Between the time of working at the bank until retirement from SBC Services, I worked as a main-frame COBOL and Assembler programmer.  At my last place of employment I had occasion to make some changes to the company's intranet ... and a new area was opening to me.

Building Websites

After I retired, I enrolled in Belleville Area Coillege again - this time to learn more about building websites.  To put my learning into practice, my church pastor allowed me to design and build a website for our church.  I was off and running again -- now I have something that I can do in retirement!    I have built sites for a church, several church related sites, political club/organizations, a computer learning center, an artist, and an adoption agency.  It has been an exciting career and I am happy to have lived through and been able to see the many changes in the computer field.


 - Ruth Dehne

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