2 Jan
2006
2 Jan
'06
2:20 p.m.
M H Stein <dm561 at torfree.net> wrote:
The L series was a type of computer that's largely ignored by the
historical community, often written off as _just_ an accounting machine.
First there was the F series which, along with Monroe and NCR
equivalents, could be found in pretty well every small bank back in
the 50s & 60s. Completely electro-mechanical, they were basically
multi-total adding machines with a wide carriage for ledger cards
and journal paper rolls. If you think a Selectric is a complicated
system of levers & springs, you've never seen the insides of one of
these babies; they were "programmed" with different length metal
pins inserted in specific locations in a program panel running the
width of the machine. Printing was done with type bars for the
numeric data and a type box for alpha (if an alpha model).
That describes very well what I remember seeing in my local bank
up through the mid/late 70's. In particular I recall a machine
with a large number of knobs and wheels and dials that they would put my
passbook in and it would compound interest and tally deposits/
withdrawals, stamping out results into the passbook after a good
amount of whirrirng and churring. Sometime in
the early 80's it became electronic and the dot matrix printing used
by that machine was not nearly as legible as the big formed numerals
and dark blue ink that the old machine had used!
I was always under the impression that the passbook-updating machine
was special purpose for that only, and that in the back was the machine
that could be reconfigured for other less routine jobs. For a lot
of loan calculations they simply looked up the result in preprinted
tables (I think I collected a few of the thinner tables at the time!)
Tim.