My RetroChallenge 2012 entry

On 9 Jul 2012 at 8:41, Fred Cisin wrote: Heh, I remember that a friend worked for a Chicago-area manufacturer that had just replaced their unit-record equipment with a 360/20 setup. Every week a big thick report would be generated and bound and placed on the desk of the CEO. Whereupon, it would be placed in a closet with all of the other weekly thick reports, never to be read. A couple of years down the road, said CEO went to an IBM marketing session (something along the line of "What modern data processing can do for your company"). Of course, IBM carpet-bombed the affair with sales people and system analysts. Said CEO asked about modernizing his operation (he lied and said it was basically a paper ledger operation, but had salses and production data ready). The analyst replied that he thought his operation was the perfect candidate for some unit-record automation. When asked about a computer, the guy responded that it was probably overkill. The contract for the 360/20 was terminated the next week. My friend lost his job and went back to school. I've always thought that a lot of BDP (there's another acronym for you new-schoolers) was make-work. --Chuck