Remember Punched cards - The role women played in early computing wiring
Punched-card data processing was invented by Herman Hollerith for the 1890 US census, which used a simple tabulating machine to count census data, stored on punched cards. Tabulating machines steadily became more complex, becoming feature-laden "accounting machines" that could generate business reports. Businesses made heavy use of these electromechanical accounting machines and by 1944, IBM had 10,000 tabulating and accounting machines in the field.
The woman in Abbott's photos illustrates the large, but mostly ignored role that women played in electrical manufacturing. Women formed the majority of workers in the 1920s radio manufacturing industry, and their presence in electrical manufacturing increased even more when World War II led many women to take industrial jobs. The famous ENIAC computer (1946) also illustrates this: most of the "wiremen" assembling the ENIAC computer were in fact women, probably recruited from the telephone company or radio assembly.8
The photos also provide a glimpse into the era before digital computers, when businesses used electromechanical accounting machines and tabulators for their data processing. Although you'd expect a machine from 1934 to be primitive, the IBM 405 accounting machine in the photos was an advanced piece of technology for its time, containing 55,000 parts and 75 miles of wire.5 These punched card machines were also capable of performing complex scientific tasks, even contributing to the Manhattan Project. In the 1960s, businesses gradually switched from accounting machines to stored-program business computers such as the IBM 1401. Even so, IBM continued marketing accounting machines until 1976.
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Worked for a big insurance company. Coders would code the briefs indicating a payment or change in a policy, keypunchers would punch the cards from the brief, and we would have a "weekly" computer run where all those cards were fed into the computer to update the policy records. After the run was completed, we would get the boxes of the IBM cards to file in policy # order.
My mom had forced me to take typing in seventh grade. There were only two boys in my typing class.
My Fortran class was similarly lopsided, but mostly men.
Most of the guys would pay someone else to punch their cards, or maybe have a girlfriend do it.
Typing my own cards gave me a huge advantage, especially at the end of the term when people who could type were in short supply.
This was the keypunch we used:
It amazes me what was considered "women's work" even into the 'seventies. Sure there's been progress, but not nearly enough.
My grandma was a shipyard welder in World War II. Amazingly she kept working after the war, but she was limited to fine detail work, which arguably required greater skill than what the men were doing. She was, of course, paid much less.
The same was true in the data processing industry.
