Abstract
We can best see many things from a historical perspective. What were the first pioneers doing in the information technology departments of Finnish manufacturing companies? In early 1960s, I had a special chance to work in a steel industry that had long traditions to use rather advanced tools and methods to intensify their productivity. The first computer in our company had such novel properties as movable disk packs making a direct access of stored data possible. In this paper, we describe the following issues and innovations in some depth. These include (a) transitioning from the punched card machines to a new computer era, (b) using advanced programming language to intensify production of new computer software, (c) drawing pictures by using a line printer, (d) supporting steel making with mathematical software, (e) storing executable programs to the disk memory and calling and moving them from there to the core memory for running, and (f) building a simple report generator. I will also pay attention to the breakthrough in those innovations and in this way demonstrate how some computing solutions were growing at that time.
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Järvinen, P. (2009). Reflections of Computing Experiences in a Steel Factory in the Early 1960s. In: Impagliazzo, J., Järvi, T., Paju, P. (eds) History of Nordic Computing 2. HiNC 2007. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 303. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03757-3_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03757-3_21
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