2nd Generation UNIVAC goodies
In the early seventies, while in the Navy, I was assigned to an office on the USS Constellation CVA 64, where we dealt with every single report turned into us for requesting maintenance on anything that "broke" on the aircraft carrier (we were called the 3M Office - no relation to the civilian company...). One of my jobs was to do the Pentagon Report corrections for the maintenance request document that were entered into the data base with the old in, and that entailed finding the original form, then double-checking all fields on the form, then from an error report, find the individual IBM keypunch card and write the correction on the card, which had to include the specific column (out of the 80 columns...), and the correct code - one card and one column at a time. God forbid one of the S7 computer guys made a mistake on the spaghetti cable patch panel before running the report (on 18 inch wide tractor fed light green and white computer paper), where this report for the ship would run more than 2000 pages... Those were the days, where the UNIVAC was housed in the best air-conditioned space on the ship, and was bigger than a VW micro-bus. Oh, and don't let me forget the tape back-up reels the size of a turkey platter (I actually show Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory so that my kids can see what those looked like...!!!). Somewhere in a closet, I still have a box of IBM key-punch cards...
