Delete comment from: Ken Shirriff's blog
Posting a message for a 96 year old reader:
"I started out as a U.S. Army Tabulating Machine Operator in 1947. In about 1970 I was working as a private consultant in San Francisco for IBM installations. One of the individuals I used to help out was an ex Univac programmer that was about my age. One time he left a Univac Plugboard with me and never picked it up. I later learned he found a full-time job in an IBM installation and severed all connections to consulting work. He had told me that it was an Emulator Board that an Ex Univac-engineer had developed. On several occasions I have been tempted to drop the board off at the dump but just couldn’t do it. Review of your blog confirms that it is in fact a 1004 board and looks identical to the picture you show. In fact, my experience is that no single application plugboard requires as many wires as shown in your picture, and in my board. Therefore, I think your picture of an application board is actually a 1004 emulator board that could have been used for payroll processing. Although, according to what I read, emulator processing was hard on internal selectors of the 1004."
Mar 11, 2025, 4:10:10 PM
Posted to Reverse-engineering a mysterious Univac computer board