The Punched Paper Tape Computer (1970)

"At a cost of $ 20,000.00. the computer was used for financial statement presentations, but not for income tax preparations. Each client had to have six different rolls of tape. The computer had a working memory but no storage. Every month for each client, we would read in the last month ending tapes. We would index in all the current month transaction and it would update the general ledger. The financial statement would then be printed. The updated general ledger tape would then be printed out and stored for next month. We modified an electric pencil sharpener to be used to roll up the tapes. When we first set up the computer, we could not get it to work. The salesman for the computer couldn’t get it to work either. We followed the instructions very carefully until we found a barrier and the computer wouldn’t work at all. The instruction contained an asterisk and we couldn’t find what this asterisk was referring to. After days trying to get the computer to work, we just tried indexing an asterisk and it would work perfectly. The lack of instructions and information were a problem and trying to solve an issue was very difficult at that time."
- Gerald Dix