Technolody Retains The Basics

Technology

These days nearly everyone has a PC or Mac on their desk. Office computers monitor each other. Networks send information around the globe and computers update data automatically without human touch.

It’s easy to conclude we’ve come light-years from the tasks performed just 30 years ago by early-generation computers and computer technicians.

But people like Walt Highberg will tell you some aspects of the computer world haven’t changed that much.

Except in the areas of speed, storage and networking capacity, many Spokane area office technology systems are recognizable cousins of the large mainframes that people like Highberg managed decades ago.

Back then, Highberg and others toiled on machines the size of large refrigerators.

And compared to the speed of most office PCs, those mainframes were binary turtles, chunking through code in hours that now takes seconds.

They also worked in the pre-Internet days. Programmers stuck with a problem now search the Web and download software tools to find a quick fix.

But their jobs virtually matched what today’s IT professionals do. They tweaked business applications, such as managing customer records, or updating a company payroll and pension database. And they kept the computers running.

Highberg, who retired a few years ago after serving as a programmer at Kaiser, said they relied on machines that were slow but reliable.

“They didn’t go down often. They kept running. And if we had problems, it was easy to get service.”

Like many of Spokane’s firstgeneration of office technology workers, Highberg shopped his skills around town. He worked for some of the larger banks, at area colleges, for Spokane County and later Cominco and Washington Water Power Co.

Of the big-iron mainframes with clunky names like IBM System 370 model 158, Highberg says, “Those machines earn my respect the way a Model T does. But like with a Model T, it’s not the car I’d like to drive now. Everything today is faster, easier to work on and cheaper.” Mainframes - which are still in use at some of the area’s larger firms like Avista - were managed far differently than today’s network-administered office PCs.

The early mainframes were restricted-access machines. Designated operators controlled what jobs ran and when.

Later versions allowed multiple users to send data to the machine, relying on terminals cabled to the host machine.

`You’d sit in a different room separated by a wall from the mainframe,” Highberg said. Highberg, 60, learned programming skills while working for Boeing. He moved to Spokane in the mid-1970s and got his first programming job with ARCE Corp., a small engineering firm.

He tackled computer applications that tracked use of manpower and materials for some of the area’s largest construction firms.

Some programming jobs a week - compared to today’s typical effort of several hours or a few days.

His first machine had 16K (16,000 bits) for programmable memory. Today’s computers, even basic units, have 40 megabits - 40 million bits.

It would be wrong, says Janice Coburn, another early computer programmer, to think that today’s systems are light-years ahead of the mainframe machines.

In 1977, after getting a degree at Spokane Community College, Coburn went to work at Fidelity Mutual Savings.

She later took the same job with Spokane’s Old National Bank, which later was acquired by US Bank.

One of her early tasks was managing the mainframe programs for the bank’s “Wave Tech” service.

That service was an early, effective touch-tone phone interface for bank customers. After dialing a bank number, customers punched keys that activated recordings summarizing their account data.

In fact, most banks today have the same service, but use smaller machines and different software.

“That system may have been rudimentary, but it worked good,” said the 45-year-old Coburn, who works now as a senior system analyst for Kaiser.

Some features Coburn doesn’t miss. For example, the mainframe system at the bank relied on key-punch cards to change any program.

Those cards - officially known as 80-byte card images - disappeared in the late 1970s.

At Fidelity, and later at Old National Bank, Coburn wrote out her programs on sheets of paper, then gave them to keypunch operators.

The operators input the program commands, creating a deck of punch cards that could number 800 or more in a long stack.

Since every program entered into the mainframe took hours to complete, a key concern was getting access to the machine, she recalled.

Without the help of the person who inserted the cards into the machine, Coburn sometimes would wait a day or more to run a program.

“You always tried to keep good relations with the system operator. That made your life a lot easier,” Coburn said.

Though she now programs applications for Kaiser far differently, Coburn agrees that the best features of the mainframe period persist, but are largely invisible to the rest of us.

“I still use COBOL (the primary language for IBM mainframes). The tools it has are more robust, more powerful. I can do more things faster.

“But COBOL is still the same. It’s still widely used.”