My '69 Z28 Find

[resto4u]

What was the IBM card used for? First step of the car order? Was the build sheet printed from the IBM card? Must be rare to find one, if they used the buildsheet to build the car.

[PeteLeathersac]

I think I've mentioned this here in the past but late 60's when I was a kid we lived in Oshawa GM Canada town and my dad used to bring these IBM cards home to use as paper or other stuff...like our bicycle spokes held w/ clothespins!.
Dad was an electrical-mechanical engineer / math-physics guru who had quit the business world to teach school and was head of math at one of the large Oshawa high schools..
He was into computers then and had been since the 50's although besides big business there was little going on w/ them in the late 60's..
I have no idea how he was ending up w/ the IBM cards but being they were lose you'd expect whatever they were used for at the GM plant was over after the cars were built also not usually left in cars?.

[img]<<GRAEMLIN_URL>>/beers.gif[/img]
~ Pete

[bergy]

Those IBM cards were what we used to program the computers with! All the students at General Motors Institute had to learn &quot;FORTRAN IV&quot;. Each step in the program sequence had to be punched onto those cards and read into the computer. Raw data was also fed into the computers on punch cards. If you wanted to computer to &quot;know&quot; all of the build options on a car, a keypunch operator had to punch out an IBM card from the list provided. After the cards were read by the computer, the inventory requirements were calculated for the rolling build schedule. God I'm old!
Pete - I visited the St Catherines MCP many time when I was Supt of Production at Tonawanda MCP. It was pretty common knowledge in GM that St Catherines MCP was the most efficient and best quality foundry in GM.

[PeteLeathersac]

Cool info Bergy!.
Did you work w/ Fran P. at Tonawanda?.

So how/where/why would an IBM card end up in any vehicle especially the one it belongs to?.
Sporadic spot checks to confirm all's flowing correctly?.

[img]<<GRAEMLIN_URL>>/hmmm.gif[/img]
~ Pete

[Xplantdad]

Good old FORTRAN (Formula Translation) and COBOL (Common Business Operating Language)...i Learned them both in 11th grade (flowcharts and all). I was really familiar with the IBM cards.

The one program that I &quot;programmed through the cards&quot; was to run the sequence of Fibonacci numbers to 100,000. [img]<<GRAEMLIN_URL>>/headbang.gif[/img]

Took me quite a while to get it to work...LOL

[bergy]

I was at the foundry and Fran was at the motor plant. Even though the plants were connected and I would be at QC meetings at the motor plant, I didn't know Fran. It's been a lot of years and I don't know axactly when Fran was at Tonawanda. I spent most of my time in operations (on the shop floor). Since I never worked at Norwood, I can't speak to how the IBM card got into a car. I did work at the St. Louis Corvette Assy plant when I was co-oping as a student. We used build sheets. The same info was on the punch cards though (the punch cards were the source for the eventual build sheet).

Sorry to steal this thread!

[Xplantdad]

Great info Bergy!

[MosportGreen66]

Bergy, Pete, Bruce and Steve... thanks a lot for the info!

Got to love UPS...



From a member here nonetheless!

[Salvatore]

Traction Action baby!

[firstgenaddict]

Sam... XF is M21 with 4.10 Gears

Gotta love the flat hood and slick look sans the spoiler....

Same Hood, lack of spoiler and month build as the Lemans Blue one I am doing now.