Rumors of 1960s computing

I worked for Hughes Aircraft through the early 90s. When our facility was built in 1966, engineers wrote programs on punch cards, and left them outside their offices at the end of the day.

Someone came around with a cart, collected the cards, and drove them near the LAX airport. The cards were read in, executed, and the output printed. The cards and output were bundled and driven back to the office for the engineers to get in the morning.

My boss was the age of my parents. He once gave me a stack of punch cards and had me get the program running again. We still had a card reader, and could transfer the program to magnetic tape. I got it running. Some comments in the code were from the year I was born.

When I was in college in the early 80s, my professors were of course a decade or three older than I was. One told me of learning to program computers by manually unplugging and plugging in wires to change the program. The image below is ENIAC, which might be a little older, but not much.

ENIAC programming, before people realized that computers were important and still allowed women to play with them.

Another possibility is that my professors probably used analog computers. Many scientific problems boil down to solving differential equations (calculus), whether you are solving thermodynamics or a beam bending or whatever. Before digital computers came around, some bright soul realized that electrical circuits can behave like differential equations too. So a physical problem can be modeled with electrical circuits, and the output, say voltage versus time, could replicate temperature versus time, for example.

In a college lab in the mid 80s, we had to use an analog computer, and had absolutely no idea what we were doing. Eventually the professor came along, fixed our circuits in seconds with no explanation, and we got the right answers. We were very grateful never to see an analog computer again.