Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The applications we were developing were for the National Institutes of Health
(NIH), and we had to keep track of records of equipment and personnel. However,
my very first program was to recode an earlier application that had been written
for an IBM 650 computer, which was removed from service when the IBM 1401s
arrived. Apparently, it had not occurred to the department chief who had been run-
ning the program that the IBM 650 programs would not operate on an IBM 1401.
The IBM 1401 that my department of the Public Health Service had available
only had 4 K of memory (less than a modern wristwatch). To develop some of the
larger applications, we had to go a few blocks away and use an 8-K 1401 that had
been acquired by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
In the 1960s, computer security was fairly casual and we had no difficulty bor-
rowing time on the IRS IBM 1401. Of course, today IRS computers are heavily
guarded and IRS software personnel are thoroughly vetted. In the early 1960s,
hacking, identity theft, and denial of service attacks were still unheard of.
Computer rooms in those days were signs of technical sophistication, and many
organizations still proudly displayed their computers in glass-walled rooms that
were visible from the street so passersby would know that the organization was
modern.
We developed our programs on lined paper worksheets preprinted with line
numbers; we then punched them into IBM 80-column cards on an IBM 026 punch
card. This was before the days of fully staffed data centers, so we often had to load
and run the programs ourselves if the console operator was busy.
This decade was the archetype of the term “cowboy programming.” We were
working before structured programming had been defined, and most of us had
learned programming only a few months before. In this era, new programmers
working on new applications were quite common.
Although IBM and other groups were building large applications, most of the
projects we handled were small and done by single programmers. As I recall,
about 500 lines of Autocoder or 50 function points was the largest application I
did for the Public Health Service before joining the private industry, where we did
have larger systems.
There were no trained test groups and no formal quality assurance teams. Even
inspections and peer reviews were only just getting started, and they were used
mainly on larger team projects rather than smaller one-person projects.
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