JF Ptak Science Books Post 2722
There is a continuing thread on this blog on The History of Holes--it is a series about, well, holes and what isn't in them/what used to be in them/what you can see through them, and so on. This particular section of holes relates to the control and distribution of data and the great efficacy of utilizing holes punched into cards which would be arranged and tabulated in such a way as to order and manipulate mountains of data. That said I don't recall seeing anything in print from the heyday of keypunching that actually mentioned the holes, as it does here--nor have I seen a non-William-Burroughs connection made between handguns, bullets, holes, and tabulation. Oddly enough, there is a connection with a crime fighter who didn't use a gun and whose sidekick used the exclamation "Holy ______ (computer, etc., and no expletives). And so we get to unite punched cards, computers, W.S. Burroughs, Batman, and The Time Tunnel. (The Time Tunnel?--yes indeed, the tv show from the 60's can be brought into this as well..)
This is one of the first pages in a promotional pamphlet entitled Your Opportunity with the Maintenance Service Department Tabulating Machines Division of Remington Rand (ca. 1935-40). The title is stubby and factual, and the company was putting out a feeler for future engineering employees who could be trained to service and repair the many machines produced by Remington Rand that could be found in a largish business.
Remington Rand at one time was Remington Arms, and then diversified to produce all manner of light and heavy electrical goods (and of course famously producing the standard U.S. Army sidearm, the 45-calber Remington M1911 pistol), and by the end of WWII the company produced a vast line of tabulating equipment (of another order of high caliber). Interestingly the pamphlet exclaims that a person working for RR could work there for as long as they wanted, that the company was there to stay.
Certainly the company would hang on for some time in one form or another, but the tabulating card division was about to change drastically. In 1950 RR purchased Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company (ENIAC) and a few years later (1952) secured another giant computer pioneer, Engineering Research Associates (ERA), making Remington Rand about the largest computer company in the world. RR would be purchased a few years later by Sperry in 1955, becoming Sperry Rand, and then simply Sperry a short time after that; later, in 1986, Sperry would merge with Burroughs and become Unisys. Somewhere in there all of these tabulating machine repairmen and techs hired fresh in 1946 would be out of their lifetime job less than a decade later.
Now back to William S. Burroughs--the gun/tabulating connection there is that Mr. Burroughs accidentally shot and killed his wife in a game of "William Tell"--he is also the grandson of William Seward Burroughs of Burroughs Adding/Tabulating Machine and computer mainframe fame. (Burroughs was founded in 1886 and became Burroughs Corp in 1953 and was one of the nine major computer manufacturers in the U.S. 100 years after its founding Burroughs Corp merged with Sperry--which had absorbed Remington Rand--to become Unisys.)
On to The Batman of the 1960's tv show where the connection between punched holes and "holy" is obvious and obscure--the caped crusader and Robin used a Burroughs computer (the B205) in the Batcave. The same goes for The Time Tunnel, where we see another use of the B205, used to enable the intrepid time travelers to jump into their funnel-shaped time machine and dive into a hole in time much like Harry Potter at platform 9 3/4. I suspect that there are more examples, but I'll stop here.
- (A big salute to the "Starring the Computer" website, which has an extensive list of the B205 appearing in movies and television: http://starringthecomputer.com/computer.html?c=45 as well as a very long list of appearances of many other non-fictional computers. It is an excellent effort!)
Lastly, some illustrations from the pamphlet, which surpisingly does not show up at all in WorldCat/OCLC.
["Typical office installations of Remington Rand equipment"]
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