COMPUTER MEMORIES, Chapter 26

FROM IBM CARDS TO TELETYPES, AT ROCKETDYNE
At North American Aviation, I worked at Rocketdyne, where we built the engines for the Atlas, Thor, and Saturn missiles. I helped design and install a production control system that used the IBM 305 RAMAC as the central computer. When it was finally in operation, the disk file contained a record of each engine part or assembly that was on the factory floor. As an operation was completed, an IBM punched card was placed in a card reader on the factory floor, and the information was sent by phone lines to the IBM Room, then punched an IBM card that was then fed into the IBM 305 RAMAC System.

As I remember, there were something like 50 disks, each about 2 feet in diameter. The references on the Internet say the RAMAC disk held 5,000,000 characters, but I am positive (but not sure) we had 10,000, 1,000 character sectors on our disk, a total of 10,000,000 characters. There were two “read/write” heads on sticks, that could be watched as they moved in and out and up and down an oily pole, like a monkey on a stick, looking for data.

In response to questions about where this or that part was in the factory, we needed to send information from the RAMAC to Teletype machines located near the rocket-engine production facilities, in several buildings. I went to an engineering company of some kind, and helped them design (I did the functional design, they did the electronic design) a box about the size of a small refrigerator, that could translate the holes in an IBM card, and send that information over a telegraph line to Teletype machines.

We would receive a request by telephone, record it on a wire recorder, then a key punch operator would punch a card that would be read into the RAMAC, and the required information would be punched into cards. Those cards would be placed in a modified key punch machine, which would send the information through the translate machine, to the teletype network. People came from all over the world (well a man from Italy, at least) to see what we were doing. No such thing as on-line terminals, in those days.