COMPUTERS, BUT NOT AS WE KNOW THEM...
Computers, as we think of them now.
To recap the past couple of posts here on Substack, I have been writing about my first days in Australia. A place I arrived with hardly any cash, no job prospects, and the name of only one person. A person who, as it turned out, I fell out with in the first two days! From there, it was on to locate a place to live, and in my naivety, a job. Seeing as I had arrived in Australia with a little less than $50, a job was not just a necessity, but a sharp nudge in the direction of being able to stay.
If I had not found a job, I would soon be winging my way back to Canada on my return airfare ticket, having just experienced the world's most expensive weekend.
To be honest, I thought finding a job would be as easy as picking an apple off a tree. I thought all I had to do was walk through the door of a bank and ask for a job, considering that I had all of two years banking experience (in another country).
As it turned out, I was incredibly lucky. The Bank of New South Wales were willing to take me on, as long as I could produce a letter of recommendation from my former employer. Did I have such a thing?!
Of course not! Why would I think of that, considering I thought of very little other than jumping on an aeroplane and shooting off to some foreign place?
But my luck held. They agreed to wait for the letter and would let me start work immediately.
Not customer facing, handing out money behind a till. Oh no, not that! They wanted me to work in the computer department.
What I knew about computers was zero. But, the year being 1968, not many other people knew much about computers either. Unless you were a techno-whizz kid, computer was not a word that was even spoken about. No one could foresee what this machine could do the world in general in the coming decades.
It's hard to imagine, in light of ubiquitous computers are now, and how tiny they can be, what their fore-runners looked like.
They were not just big, not just enormous, they filled whole rooms! Floor to ceiling, huge towers with whirring parts and slots and buttons and spitting out concertinaed papers. A two bedroom apartment would not have been able to contain them.
They were enormous, like the control room of some futuristic spacecraft.
They ran 24 hours a day. What would happen if they stopped? No idea, but I would imagine it would take someone smarter than Einstein to get them going again. These were the wheels of industry that had to be fed and kept going endlessly.
The room (or maybe rooms) that housed these monstrosities had tables in the central part of the room, where the staff (all women) worked on these huge bundles of concertinaed papers.
Our job was to “reconcile” these papers. How that worked, I can't remember, as the whole thing did not make much sense to me. I only knew that if the numbers on two sheets of paper matched, it was “job done”. If they didn't, you had to find out why, so that it could be corrected. I imagine it would be fed back into the maw of the computer with the wrong number edited out and a correct number put in. But, to be honest, I understood so little of the process, it was all a mystery.
One of the other women who did this reconciliation process was an American woman who was a dead ringer for being the winner of the Doris Day look-alike contest. She always seemed to know how to get her papers to balance, and helped me when I floundered. Which was quite a lot.
The computer department ran on a three shift pattern. Day shift, night shift, and graveyard. All of us women who worked there only did two weeks of days, then two weeks of nights. The graveyard, throughout the night, was strictly for the men. I guess the bank didn't want the expense of sending us home in the wee small hours in a taxi. The men, presumably, were macho enough to find their own way home, and no one was going to molest them.
The two weeks of night shift gave me the time to spend part of the day exploring the city of Sydney and all its delights. That's how I ended up on Bondi Beach with a sunburn in November. Everything in Australia had a slightly upside down quality to it. At least it did if I compared it to my previous life.
It's hard to imagine how computers have shrunk and changed over the years, until they can be held in the palm of a person's had. In future, perhaps they will be inserted into tooth fillings and people will look back on today's computers as dinosaurs. The future is unknown, and always has been. Maybe that's a good thing.
Can you remember anything from your youth that is no longer in use? That has changed our lives as radically as the computer? They say the past is a foreign country.
Is it ever! That's why it is time travelling to go back there.
Comments, as always, super welcome. They always make my day.
Until next Monday,
Rose
That's interesting Rose. I think it's important that everyday work processes are recorded for posterity. The head of finance at my place of work told me he remembered working with huge ledger books when he first started work in the late 1950s. Some of these ledgers were still in the university archives. They were massive things, the pages at least twice the size of the old bibles you sometimes see on the lectern in church. It brought to mind Bob Cratchitt in Dickens' "A Christmas Carol"!
This made me think back to my junior year in high school when I learned how to type on a manual typewriter. It was hard but had such a satisfying clunk when you used the return lever! Fun to read!