Unit record equipment
The machine room that sorted, counted and printed punched cards without a computer anywhere in sight — sixty years of data processing before the database existed.
A punched card was a unit record: one complete entry, self-contained, with no file system or index around it. The deck was the database. Around it stood a line of machines, each doing one step — keypunch, verifier, sorter, collator, reproducer, interpreter and tabulator — and the operator carried the deck between them in whatever order the job demanded. A payroll run was, in the literal sense, a walk.
Programming happened on a plugboard: a panel with hundreds of sockets, wired by hand to connect reading brushes to counters and printers. Changing jobs meant pulling out one board and dropping in another. Sorting was physical radix sort, one column at a time starting from the least significant, with the whole deck fed through the machine once per column.
IBM lived on this well into the 1960s, and it was punched-card revenue that paid for the development of System/360. The habits outlived the hardware: the eighty-character line, the sequence numbers in columns 73–80 for whoever dropped the deck on the floor, and the word batch for a job that runs with nobody sitting there waiting for it.