COMPUTER MEMORIES, Chapter 63

SCAN DATA
A friend “insisted” I go to work with him at Scan Data Corp., selling Optical Character Recognition equipment. I really enjoyed working with that equipment. The very day I was hired at Scan Data, I was at the Headquarters near Philadelphia, and they introduced me to a very newly hired Sales Manager, a man I had known and intensely disliked (and the feeling was very mutual) at a previous company. In my opinion he was completely incompetent, but then he was making more money than I was. I successfully sold Scan Data equipment, but not to his satisfaction.

At an insurance company on Wilshire Blvd., the OCR System, that included a PDP-8 computer, was two inches longer than the elevator. We had to take the glass out of a fourth story window, and I have a photo of the system at the end of a cable, being lifted into the computer facility, high above Wilshire Blvd. See photo

That Optical Character Recognition system was installed at the insurance company, at the telephone company, etc., to read paid bills, and at McDonald Douglas Aircraft for a variety of jobs. Perhaps half of the machine contained the paper feeder and transport equipment, and it could read one type font, called OCR A. Quite different from the scanner you can buy these days for a few bucks, tuck it under your arm and go home.

Another little story about the Vice President who hired me at Scan Data. We had remained friends after I left Scan Data, and saw each other, and talked several times. Several years later when I was working for a competitor (Scan Optics), we met and talked one evening, and I was to call him at his hotel the next morning to talk about something.

When I called, the hotel telephone operator made a mistake and connected me in such a way that I could hear the VP’s phone conversation with someone else, and I was pleased to hear what I wasn’t supposed to hear. The VP was telling someone how good I was at what I was doing, and that they didn’t stand a chance at a couple of contracts, we both were working for. (And if it is remembered correctly, the VP was right about that.)

I did call the hotel manager to tell him what happened. He told me their new telephone system (that would park an incoming call on a busy line until it became free) had been installed within the week, and I could be positive he would see that someone would suffer, and he would also see it was installed properly, immediately.