My Life With Technology - Chapter 1.2

by Bill Holmes

This next chapter in my continuing saga with technology from the stone ages has to do with the introduction of credit cards for the masses. Up until the early 1970's, universal credit cards were not a fact of life for most families. There were store credit cards, especially for high dollar stores, although "card" may not be the right term. They were more like credit accounts where the privileged few just said "put that on my account" or "put that on Daddy's account". I never got to say that. There were revolving accounts at some retailers, usually reserved for large purchases like a new refrigerator. I think Sears and Penney's were beginning to issue store cards. Weren't the old Sears and Penny's cards about a third or a half the size of a normal credit card?  There were gas cards that were limited to the issuing company's (Gulf, Shell, Texaco) gas stations and products. Diners Club and American Express introduced more general cards in the 1950's. Those were for the rich or business travelers and were not accepted outside the transportation, lodging and dining industries and not by all of them. That all changed in the late 1960's and early 70's. BankAmericard (now VISA), soon followed by Master Charge (now MasterCard), began introducing a generic credit card. One not attached to a specific store or industry. More importantly, one not confined to the rich and famous. They franchised banks around the country to issue and administer the cards. If you're old enough, you may remember that there were mass mailings of actual credit cards. There were also mass mailings of applications that the banks were not prepared to process so most were approved. What could possibly go wrong?

Somewhere around 1969 or 1970, First National Bank of Atlanta (FNB) became the lead BankAmericard bank for the southeast USA. That will figure in again when I get to chapter 3.0 of this saga. For now I'll relay the events of a major bank in a major market that was overwhelmed by this new consumer credit card.

I think FNB mailed a credit card to every account holder they had. If we had your name and address you got one. No need to have good credit or even a positive balance. No need to call to activate the card, just start using it. Guess what, some of those new cardholders didn't pay their bills. Other cards fell into the wrong hands. Either by people stealing mail or rummaging through trash. Often the people that didn't want them just threw the cards out. Blind mailings back then weren't quite as bad as they would be now because not every business accepted these newfangled credit cards. Of course the bad guys found every establishment that did. There were significant write-offs.

The franchised BankAmericard banks had to issue and process their own cards. There was no national card processing center. I'm sure Bank of America gave/sold us the software to do that, but it was less than stellar. There were technological limitations back then too.

Enough about the early credit card fiscal problems, let's move onto the the side I know about, the processing of those accounts and transactions. It was a mess. At FNB we were no where near ready to process this application. There were no new computers installed or on order and little or no training.  I can only guess that the powers that be thought credit cards would be a small, slow growing, application or that we had tons of excess computing capacity. Neither assumption was correct.

Even with  low transaction volumes, the BankAmericard application took time to process. Time we didn't really have to spare. There was also little or no infrastructure in place. In many ways we were going backwards. Typical, either the mucky mucks forgot to ask if it was possible or feasible or the lower level manages were afraid to say they couldn't absorb the work. They never asked me.

I'm going to describe what the computer and support departments had to do to process the BankAmericard application. Realize that there were many steps by several departments before and after our part. None of those departments were any better prepared than we were. I'm sure I'll leave something out or get something wrong but I think you'll get the gist.

If you are old enough, you remember getting a punch card in your credit card bill. That was the part you mailed in with your check to pay your bill. Do you remember that it said "do not fold, spindle or mutilate". There's a reason for that, that card/statement had to be processed by humans and computers to get your payment to the right place. You may also remember that the bottom copy of that credit card slip you signed at the store was card stock. That also was sent to the bank by the merchants to be processed. By "sent", I don't mean electronically transmitted over the internet. I mean physically taken to the bank or mailed, snail mail, not email.

51 Column Receipt

80 Column Receipt

Let's talk about the individual transactions first. You may find this hard to believe, but sometimes they got "folded, spindled & mutilated", they also got stapled, torn, stained, taped, wet, glued and any other thing you can do to a piece of card stock. They were often impossible to read. They came in two different sizes, the regular 80 column card size and the compact 51 column size. That is an enormous logistical problem. Almost every keypunch, card reader and tabulating machine is set for 80 column, usually pristine, cards. Now we have 80 and 51 column cards that have been abused. They had to be separated to be processed. There were attachments for the various machines to switch between the two sizes but it was far from automatic.

Credit Card Reader

Those original cards found there way to our Keypunch Department. Once there they had to have the account number, merchant number and transaction amount punched into the card. This was not only a big increase in workload, but a big change in input source documents. Now you are keypunching data into an original source document rather than punching a blank card. These documents were the third copy of a three part form in the days of carbon paper. Often this third copy was not the easiest to read. Besides faint or smudged credit card images, the dollar amounts were hand written. Guess what, some people have terrible handwriting. Others don't press very hard when they write. What happens if keypunch makes a mistake? Unlike blank stock cards, you couldn't just throw the botched receipt away. We had to find a way to cover the erroneous punches and fix it. Some company invented itty bitty silver mylar tape patches to cover the bad punches. We bought them by the case. These patches fixed the immediate problem but they caused many others. Tape comes loose, either completely or at a corner. The sticky side of the patch was over a hole which could stick to another card or pick up dirt, dust and other crud. All this could cause jams and misreads in the equipment that had to process these cards. An IBM 084 card sorter ran at 2,000 cards per minute (CPM), the IBM 2501 card reader or 2540 reader/punch on the computer read 600 CPM. As you can imagine, the tolerances were pretty tight. A piece of tape, no matter how small, in the machine guts will cause a problem. You can mangle quite a few cards when a jam occurs at those speeds.

So, occasionally the original document is completely botched by keypunch or mutilated somewhere else up the line. Too much for tiny patches to fix. We had a solution for that. We had a couple Xerox machines (all copiers were Xerox's regardless of the actual manufacturer) that spit out cards rather than sheets of paper. Put the bad card in the copier, a new card emerged, either 80 or 51 columns. The now pristine card went back to keypunch to have the relevant data entered. Of course the copy of a mangled card was often pretty hard to read too. For some reason that escapes me, that copier was in the production control department and not the keypunch department. Those departments were next to each other, but it still was farther away from the main user than needed. There was a procession of keypunchers through our department all day and night long.

When keypunch finished a batch of the charge slips they were sent to Tabulating (Tab) to be listed and added. If it didn't add up to the correct total someone in production control would check it. Then back to keypunch, back to Tab... Round and round until it balanced. Even if it was just one item that needed to be corrected, the whole batch had to be listed again. This was a bank and there had to be proof that everything balanced at every step. Now every time these cards were handled it was another opportunity for a jam or a correction patch to come loose. Sometimes we'd correct the one bad card in a batch only to have three or four errors on the next listing.

Eventually everything would balance and it would be time to actually run the BankAmericard applications on the IBM 360/40 computer. All these cards that had been handled multiple times now had to be read on the computer card reader and written to disk. One pass for the 80 column cards and one for the 51 column cards. Another opportunity for jams and misreads. We hardly ever missed an opportunity to have problems. The 51 column cards were especially troublesome.

After finally making it to the computer disks, the transactions were sorted for two part processing. There was merchant processing which credited all the transactions submitted by particular merchant to their account. That amount would eventually wind up as a credit to the merchant's checking account. The other process was for the individual card holder accounts. This was where your purchases were added to your account and payments were deducted. Any interest and fees were also calculated. All kinds of reports were produced for both the merchant and card holder accounts. The biggest pain was the customer statements. There were ten statement cycles a month, one every three days. Of course with weekends we actually had about 21 days to print the ten cycles. We absolutely loved the days we didn't have to print customer statements.

OK, we suffered through card based transactions. So what did we do for BankAmericard statements? Well of course we produced cards that you sent back with your payment. It took a multitude of people and machines to produce those statements. Here is the life cycle of a BankAmericard statement in 1970.

I mentioned last chapter that the IBM 2321 Data Cell, aka Noodle Snatcher, had been designed by Rube Goldberg. Well Rube or one of his close relatives designed the BankAmericard statements and their processing. This will get a little complicated and confusing, so if you get a headache just skip to the next paragraph. The statements were two up continuous form 80 column card stock. Each row of cards had a small strip separating it from the previous and following rows. The statements and separating strips were perforated on the top, bottom and sides. I have absolutely no idea why those little strips were there. The blank statements has a sequence number pre-punched and printed on them. When it came time to print the statements the operator had to try to line up the first row then enter the sequence number on the computer console. Initially there was no print test pattern to check the alignment. There was a single cycle button on the printer so you could print just one line at a time. If you got a misaligned statement way back then it was probably one of the first few printed. These statements were a pain to print. Besides getting them started, with all the perforations and the heavy stock they tended to jam. They were going at 2,000 lines per minute (LPM) so once again jams aren't fun. They didn't stack very well either. When we finally got those statements printed they had to be bursted and collated.

Forms Burster -
not the Rube Goldberg model

Rube Goldberg's family was again involved in the special burster/collator we had to get to separate the statements, remove the little strips between the rows and make a two up form into one stack of cards. Once all that was done, we sent the now separated statements back to the computer room. They were then fed into the punch side of the IBM 2540. The sequence number was read by the punch, compared to the statement file (on disk or tape) and the account number and minimum payment were punched into the statement. After about two days we found out that Rube Goldberg's burster/collator let some of those separator strips slip through. That caused problems. We eventually sent the statements to Tab to run through one of their machines to find all the chads. Of course the Tab guys loved having to clean up the garbage for the computers. The exact steps that Tab did to clean up the cards changed and evolved over time. Eventually those statements came back to the bank to be inputted as payments, but usually only after they had been "folded, spindled and mutilated" or worse.

IBM 2540 Reader/Punch  

It was and is complete stupidity to have an application that depends on slooooooooow card readers, punches and printers attached to the computer. We were running a very expensive computer at the 600 or 2,000 CPM or 2,000 LPM speeds of mechanical peripherals. That was optimal speed, not counting card and print jams. Collect the data on cheap devices and let high speed computers do their work at high speed. Now of course most raw data is captured at the source and transmitted digitally to the proper processing center.  

Once those source document charge receipts finally got entered into the computer for processing they had another journey. Are you old enough to remember that you used to get those credit card receipts back in your BankAmericard or Master Card statement? Kinda like you used to get your cancelled checks back too. Well, all those credit card transactions had to be sorted by account number. BankAmericard account numbers were thirteen digits back then they are now sixteen digits. You could eliminate the first digit, four indicated BankAmericard, still does. The next three digits were the issuing bank number, FNB was 327. That still left nine digits. Then you had to sort these folded, spindled, mutilated and patched documents into account number sequence so they could be sent back to the customer. That's another of the ways the old Tabulating Department stayed relevant. They used a combination of sorters and collators to do that. Each day's transactions were sorted then merged with the transactions from previous days. When a statement cycle dropped, those statements were merged with the sorted transactions in preparation for mailing to the customers. As you can see, those cards were run through various machines many times.

The whole BankAmericard application was a cluster f**k. Here we were with a whole infrastructure that was geared to processing checks. We were experts at MICR (magnetic ink character recognition) document processing. We processed over a million checks a day. Punch cards were for the relatively few documents that couldn't be read on the MICR equipment. So, what do we do, we introduce a punch card centric application. Just when punch cards are becoming obsolete. We weren't the only idiots, every credit card receipt back then was two plies of flimsy paper, two plies of carbon paper with a card stock bottom copy. I'm sure the Master Card banks were struggling too. It took as much or more time to process a few thousand credit card transactions as it took to process a million checks.

As complicated and convoluted as what I've described was, it was no where near the full story. There were many more steps before and after what we did in the data processing departments. There were whole new departments created. I have some general knowledge of what they did but not all the details.  The fact that anyone, merchants or cardholders, ever got a statement let alone an accurate one, is amazing.

I have no idea how long it was before FNB made any money on their BankAmericards. Besides all the startup costs for issuing and processing the cards, they had big write-offs because of the mass mailings of unsolicited cards to everybody with a pulse.

Over time the processing improved. Some of it was refinement or elimination of the steps. Some of it was getting more experience. Some of it was improvements in technology. Nowadays you can make a credit card purchase, receive a bill and make a payment without generating a single piece of paper (or card stock). We've come a very long way in 40 years. I enjoyed most of my time working back then but no one enjoyed those early days of BankAmericard processing. Let's call it a learning experience. Isn't there an old saying about that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger? Many of us got very, very strong in the first few months after consumer credit cards were introduced. Back in the day, technology wasn't for sissies.

If you found this account confusing, disjointed, complicated, puzzling, unclear and baffling then I made my point. Imagine how we felt trying to do it. I hope you also found it interesting.

I think the next chapter will be about my first experiences with check processing and the technology used circa 1970. It wasn't pretty, but it was many times better than the early days of credit card processing.

wjh

My Life With Technology - Chapter 1.1

by Bill Holmes

This is the second installment in my trip down technology memory lane. I had intended to write chapter 2.0, a time when I left the big city and big data center. Well, once I got started, I had many memories and made many notes that didn't make it into chapter 1.0 of this thread. So, instead of chapter 2.0 I give you chapter 1.1, a continuation of my days in Atlanta at First National Bank (FNB) in the main office.

I told you about the computer room equipment when I first started but there was a lot of stuff going on outside that room. There was a Tabulating (Tab) Department that processed several bank applications that were still on punch cards. Many people thought the Tab equipment was what computers were and looked like. TV programs in the 1960's often depicted a card sorter as a computer. All the Trust Department applications were processed in Tab, over a million cards on file. It made sense for the Trust applications to be some of the last converted to the computers. They were relatively low volume compared to checking, savings and installment loans. They were also relatively high dollar accounts and needed special handling. There were varying schedules for trust statements and reporting, much of it on demand. The Tab department was somewhere between the old manual personal method and the new computerized impersonal processing. The Tab guys weren't big fans of the young whippersnappers in the computer departments. They were all older than us, sometimes 20 or 30 years older. That doesn't seem that old now. They could see all the applications they used to run moving to the newfangled fancy computers. Since I mostly worked in Production Control back then I had to work with all the support departments. I'd take work into Tab that needed to be done quickly for another department that they didn't see as a priority. One solution was to do it myself. There was always a lot of idle equipment at night since there were only a couple of guys on the Tab night shift. Eventually the Tab guys got used to me and would actually do what I needed, help me do it or show me how to do it. Tabulating equipment proceeded electronic computers, those with vacuum tubes, transistors or printed circuits. It was electromechanical. The equipment was solely for the manipulation of punch cards and some of the original models dated back to the 1890's for use by the US Census Bureau. Between 1890 and 1950 the machines didn't change that much. They got faster and more reliable but the basic uses didn't change much.

IBM 084 Card Sorter

IBM 085 Collator

The main machines were a sorter (082 or 084), collator (085), reproducer (519) and tabulator (407). A sorter was a mechanical machine that could sort one column of a punch card into one of 13 pockets, 0 through 9, two zone punch pockets and a reject/no punch pocket. If you had a 10 digit account number you had to make 10 passes on the sorter, stating with the low order (units) digit to get the cards into numerical order. Alpha sorts took more passes. Collators could merge two decks of cards into one, kick out duplicates and a couple of other things. Useful for when you had new accounts to merge into a deck of older accounts or merge any two sorted decks together. A reproducer could duplicate (reproduce) all or part of a card plus a few other functions. The tabulator or accounting machine was the first computer. You could stick a handful of cards in it and it could add them up and print a report. They had programs to designate what was added, subtracted, multiplied or divided, what was printed and what was totaled and/or subtotaled.

IBM 407 Accounting Machine

IBM 519 Reproducer

The 407, 519 and 085 had crude "programs" that were large panels with changeable jumper wires (program instructions). I don't remember any 407 programmers at FNB, I guess all the main jobs had been programmed long ago and any ad hoc stuff could be handled by the Tab operators. They showed me a few basics of the "programming" language. I do remember walking through the programming department at the Prudential when I was a kid. Some of the programmers sat at what looked like draftsman desks and had panels and jumper wires piled up all around. Not what we think of as programmers today.

IBM 407 "Program"

I kind of liked the Tab department. The old salts who worked there were interesting. They were true application experts who knew everything about the jobs and equipment they ran. There was always the sound and smell of cards being manipulated. It was fun to put a big deck of cards into a sorter and see them fly into the 13 pockets. There was a rhythm and grace to handling large numbers of cards and the sounds of the machines. Tab was a dying department but they did play a vital role and even took on new tasks as we added new applications. More on that later.  

There was other old technology stuff in use. We did processing for many small banks. Those banks that were more than 100 miles or so outside of Atlanta would transmit their data to us via paper tape over voice telephone lines. The paper tape would be created at the originating bank by an attachment to a proof machine or a separate key to paper tape machine. Once created the tape would be transmitted to us in Atlanta. On our end was a machine connected to the phone network that received the paper tape data then we converted it to magnetic tape, a tiny reel of tape. I remember the noise and smell of the paper tape being created on our end. The paper to mag tape machines were made by Mohawk Data Systems and were like keypunch machines except they wrote to tape instead of cards and had a paper tape reader attached. Once on mag tape the data was processed by the computers. 

The banks we did processing for that were close to Atlanta would send the actual checks and deposit slips to us via courier. Those items were read by our Computerized Transit department on their check reader/sorters and transferred to mag tape for processing. I'll go into check processing in more detail in another chapter.

Our Delivery Zone

The farther away banks that sent their data by paper tape were processed on second or swing shift (4:00 PM to midnight). The closer banks that sent their checks to us were processed on third or graveyard (midnight to 8:00 AM) shift. At first each bank was processed separately on the IBM 1410. Later, after the application was rewritten, all banks for each shift could be processed together on the IBM 360/40. All the reports were sent back to the various banks by ground courier. The distant bank couriers picked up the output between 11:00 PM and 1:00 AM. The more local banks' reports were picked up between 4:00 and 6:00 AM. We could stretch those deadlines a little but the couriers had other customers too. We had great incentive to make the courier deadlines. If we missed them, we had to deliver the reports ourselves. That wasn't a big deal if we had to drive to Smyrna or Tucker, suburbs of Atlanta. The problems arose when we missed the courier for one of the far away banks. Those customers ranged from the Tennessee and South Carolina borders down to near the Florida border. From Toccoa to Bainbridge. If we missed one deadline we usually missed all of them. That's when we got in our cars and spread out over the state. Bainbridge was about a 250 mile drive one way. Of course we drove just a tad over the speed limit. Sometimes we'd get back to Atlanta just in time for our next shift. We almost lost a few folks who fell asleep at the wheel. I dozed off one time on I-75 but luckily veered off on an exit. The bumpy shoulder woke me up. On a few occasions we'd miss the deadlines again the next night and have to drive all over the state again. Thankfully we were young and indestructible way back then. Is it any wonder that many of us made more money in overtime than regular salary? We got mileage and meal money for those delivery trips too. I wish I could remember the mileage reimbursement rate and meal per diem. It wasn't much, but gas was really cheap until the 1973 oil embargo. You could probably get a Big Mac, fries and drink for $1.25. McDonald's didn't have a dollar menu back then because everything was less than a dollar.

In the computer room there were always changes. More applications were converted from cards,

Bus and Tag Cable

manual applications were automated, new applications and services were added by the bank and new technology was introduced. As equipment was added or replaced it required new cables. The power cables were 208V 60-Hz. The peripheral device control units were connected to the computer channels with a pair of cables called bus & tag. There were more cables from the control units to the devices, i.e. disks and tapes. These were big cables that weren't all that flexible. The cables circa 1970 were grey and were bigger and less flexible than the newer blue cables pictured. All the cables were under the raised floor which in retrospect was not raised enough. Often when old equipment was removed the cables were left under the floor. Some of this was laziness, but sometimes the cable was intertwined under and over other cables. Pulling a disconnected cable might dislodge one still connected to another device. After a while it became very difficult to add or subtract cables from certain parts of the computer room. There were many floor tiles that were floating on cables, rather than on the supports. If it was behind equipment the tiles might not be replaced. Probably not OSHA approved. Another problem was that the mass of cables restricted air flow and the missing floor tiles altered air flow so that was a constant concern.

The Culprit 

We once had an interesting mystery that plagued us for a while. We would get errors on tapes and disks. That wasn't unusual for the equipment and media back then, but we were getting more than the average number. We started gathering statistics. We put colored stickers on the media that had errors. Eventually somebody noticed that tapes and disks stored nearest the floor in the tape library had more errors. Why was that? It took some time to determine that. It turned out to be the industrial strength floor buffer that the janitor used. At least once a week he would buff the floor in the tape library bumping into the tapes and disks on the bottom racks. The giant electrical motor created enough of a magnetic field to cause the problems. The buffer was immediately banished from the library and eventually from the entire computer room. That's not the only problem we had with the janitors. Every now and then they would unplug something, knock something over or throw stuff out that wasn't trash. A couple of times they would wheel in their buckets and wet mops. Raised floors leak at the seams not to mention the cutouts and vents. Besides the data cables, the electrical plugs for the computers were under the raised floor. Over time the janitorial people were pretty much banned from the machine room.

IBM 2321 Data Cell - aka "Noodle Snatcher"

We had one very interesting piece of equipment for a short period of time. It was an IBM 2321 Data Cell. This thing was designed by the Rube Goldberg division at IBM. It was a big cabinet that held a carousel containing hundreds of strips of magnetic tape, each 2.25" x 13". These strips were grouped in cartridges that could be removed. The big carousel would rotate to get the correct cartridge to a read/write head, the proper tape strip was removed and pulled under the head. One 2321 unit held 400 or 800 MB of data. This beast was big, mechanical, noisy, slow and prone to breakdown. Other than that it was perfect. We didn't keep it for too long and I don't remember what we used it for. IBM never made any follow on models of this technology. It was fascinating to watch it in action, when it worked. Because it used strips of tape that were grabbed by mechanical arms it was nicknamed the "noodle snatcher".

Amazing times with amazing technology. Hard to believe some of this stuff was "state of the art", hard to believe some of it actually worked. I'm glad I don't have to wrestle with it anymore, but I'm also glad I went through it.

There will be at least a chapter 1.2 and maybe a 1.3 before I leave Atlanta and move on to chapter 2.0. Next I'll document our adventures with a brand new major application. One we weren't prepared for and had to learn on the fly. Stay tuned.

wjh 

  

My Life With Technology - Chapter 1.0

by Bill Holmes

An old friend, geek and fellow blogger asked that I write some articles about technology in the second half of the last century. Particularly the big IBM mainframe computers and peripherals. During a recent discussion on Google+ about how far technology has come over the years the size and cost of storage was mentioned. The example of the old was a circa 1979 IBM disk. I happened to be very familiar with IBM disks in the 1970's, 80' and 90's so I was able to add some facts and perspective. That was the seed for this exercise.

I will have to split this topic into several posts. I don't know how many and I don't have a timetable. I will attempt to include enough technical detail to satisfy the geeks and some non-technical memories and perspective of those times. I do have the advantage of working with computers at a time before most people had any idea what they were, what they did or how they did it. So, let the journey begin.

First National Bank
of Atlanta

I first reported to work in the First National Bank (FNB) of Atlanta Computer Department in 1968. That turned out to be the first day of an almost forty year career in technology. It was a complete accident. I had moved to Atlanta without a plan of what kind of job or career I wanted. I don't even remember why I applied at FNB. It was probably either a want ad in the paper, word of mouth or maybe the building closest to where I got off the bus in downtown Atlanta. I filled out an application and they offered me a job that day. I had my choice of branch teller/trainee or computer tape librarian. Thankfully I chose the computer position. It turned out that I loved almost everything about technology and seemed to be pretty good at it. Of course I had no formal training. There were barely any computers let alone Information Technology (IT) courses at college. Those were exciting times. We were at the beginning of a whole new profession and business sector.

Most of the specifications, or as we used to say the "feeds & speeds", I will quote in the next paragraphs are mind boggling. They are amazing because they are so small. There is no easy way to compare processor speeds between then and now. They are rated using different criteria. Let me assure you they were much slower 30 years ago. Memory and storage are still measured by capacity and access speed. For those of you who only know about the Apple iProducts, Android products or modern laptops you will find it hard to believe. There in no way that a large corporation with hundreds or thousands of employees and even more customers could possibly function with such primitive equipment. I'm here to tell you that we did and we did it pretty well. I promise the numbers are real and are not typos. I know the difference between a K, MB, GB and TB. There won't be any GBs or TBs in this first chapter.

Now for some details about the FNB computer room. In 1968 the computer department was relatively new and many of the banking applications were on version 1.0 or maybe 1.1. The computer room was brand new as was the bank's skyscraper. It had four computers, a big data center for those days. There was an IBM 1401, 1410, 360/30 and 360/40. These four computers filled a computer room that I estimate was around 4,000 or 5,000 square feet. All raised floor with special high capacity air conditioners.

IBM 1410 System
from the left, disks, processor/memory cabinets, tape drives, printer and card reader/punch
the operator console is in the foreground middle 

IBM 1403 Printer                                                           

The IBM 1401 had 4K of memory, no disks, two tape drives, a printer and card reader/punch. By the time I started at FNB, it was only used for printing and was soon completely phased out. The 1410 had 8K of memory, no disks, six tape drives, a printer and card reader/punch. It was used for the older application systems. All programs for these 1400's were loaded from punch cards. Of course the programs had to be smaller than the available real memory. They were all written in 1401 assembler or Autocoder. Only one program could run at a time, no multi-tasking allowed. The printers were model 1403. This was a 600 line per minute (LPM) chain impact printer. Read impact here as noisy, made even worse by the fact that we often ran them with the covers open. Why? Partly laziness and partly because a job might have several form changes and only print a few pages on each form. All paper was continuous fanfold, some multi-part with carbon paper. There were hundreds of different forms since the printers could only print characters. No graphics or colors but they could play music. The 1400 computers were transistor based. Not printed transistors but actual manufacture transistors that were soldered to a card. The individual cards were connected with miles of wire. In the above 1410 picture, take away the disk storage on the left and add a couple of tape drives and that's what we had. Although I think our 1410 only had four or six processor cabinets, not the eight in the picture. The 1401 had only one processor cabinet and no typewriter console. That console was a panel of switches, dials, buttons and lights. The 1400's didn't have an operating system (OS) as we know it. The OS functions were performed by the hardware and the application program.

I think the IBM 360/30 had 8K of memory, one disk, four tape drives, a printer and card reader. It was mostly used to print reports produced on the 1410 and 360/40. It could run in 1401 emulation mode which was an optional hardware feature. The 360/40, best that I can remember, had 32K or 64K of memory, six or seven disk drives (to start with), eight tape drives, a printer and a card reader/punch. The operating system was DOS/360. The operator consoles were industrial strength IBM Selectric typewriters plus the panel of lights, switches, dials and buttons. You had to have lotsa blinking lights. We still had punch cards to load programs but now they were just control cards to indicate which program to load from disk and any variable data like a processing date or a bank number. Most of those programs were still in IBM Basic Assembly Language (BAL) , aka assembler, with a few COBOL. The original disk drives were IBM 2311's which had removable 1316 disks that held 7.25 MB each across six platters. Those disks were abused by those of us in the computer room. Since they had so little capacity, any large application would have multiple disk changes, some had 10 or 15. Plus between jobs all the disks were usually swapped. It took a long time for the disks to cycle down to a stop so the operator would open the drive lid and use the disk cover as a brake. That was not one of IBM's recommended procedures, but there were deadlines to meet and operators were graded on how much work they ran on their shift.

IBM 360/40 Console

The 360/40 was the workhorse of the data center. It ran all the new or rewritten applications plus as many big 1410 applications, in emulation mode, as there was time for. Even with the emulation overhead it ran 1410 programs much faster than the real 1410. The 360/40 and DOS/360 also performed what we thought was magic. It could run three jobs at the same time. You could carve out two very small foreground partitions (F1 & F2) and the main processing background partition (BG). We typically had the BG processing write any print output to tape. Then we would print those tapes in F1 or on the 360/30. This was before the days of print spooling to disk by the operating system. It was also before virtual memory so that 4K of memory you allocated to F1 was real storage and dedicated. The console messages would be proceeded by F1, F2 or BG so you knew which partition produced the message. Speaking of consoles, if it ran out of paper the whole system would stop. On a couple of occasions IBM service was called and a hardware technician was dispatched. It's pretty embarrassing when the guy comes in at 3:30 AM with his tool bag, looks behind the console and tells the operator to get a new box of paper. Of course everybody on all three shifts heard about those screw ups and the ribbing was on for a few days.

Amazingly this tiny, computing power not physical size, 360/40 ran most of the major applications of the second largest bank in Georgia. All checking and savings accounts for FNB plus checking for about 25 other smaller banks and savings for twice that number were processed on that machine. One very interesting application ran all day in a foreground partition. By 1969 or 70, we had a homegrown customer information

The Elegant Solution

system that drove an IBM 7770 Audio Response Unit. The 7770 was an input/output device that attached to the computer and a telephone network. In our case it was attached to the bank PBX. From any telephone extension in the bank including the branches you could dial the 7770's extension number. You then entered a customers account number and a response in a female voice read back the account balance. It had a very limited vocabulary, just the ten digits and a few appropriate words. I seem to remember that you could put a hold on funds too but I'm not sure. This was not for customer inquiries but for bank personnel to inquire as part of their duties or when a customer requested it. Here's the kicker. All the bank's phones were rotary and the 7770 of course required touch tone input. The bank had hundreds of phones and the PBX may not have supported touch tone. The solution was to attach touch tone pads to a number of bank phones. Just those who needed to access the system got the pads. You had to dial the extension with the rotary dial and then input the account number on the touch tone pad. Very sophisticated.  We had a couple of these hybrid phones in the computer room and a few in the support departments. That was so we could do testing, check on the system when it started in the morning or if we had problems. I had one on my desk. There was no security that I knew of. I think maybe you couldn't dial the 7770 extension directly from outside the bank. Key in any account number and you got the balance. No employee number or password required. Everybody checked their own balance. It wasn't hard to find anybody's account number. After all we printed all the account reports every night. We also printed the bank employee's payroll which included the direct deposit slips.

As soon as they became available we got 3211 printers. These were 2,000 LPM and fully enclosed. With the covers closed they were much quieter than the 1403's. Of course we often ran them with the cover open. This was an impact printer too but used a train instead of a chain. What's the difference you may ask? All the character slugs in a chain are hooked together. In a train they are individual slugs not connected and float in a track. The 3211 had an electric top cover rather than the manual one on a 1403. When it ran out of paper the cover would raise up automatically. A nice time saving feature unless the operator had left a cup of coffee, a box of cards or a stack of paper on top of the printer. We cleaned up many messes and hoped none of the bosses saw it.

IBM 2314 Pizza Oven

We also added IBM 2314 disk units which consisted of nine disk drives still with removable disks but now with 29 MB capacity per drive. The 2314 was referred to as a pizza oven because of how it looked. The disks went into drawers. An odd feature was that only eight of the nine drives could be online at the same time. The spare drive could be used when performing hardware maintenance or for staging a disk for the next pack change or job. Each of the eight drives in use had a removable magnetic plug that designated the address that drive. By moving these plugs you could make any of the nine drives one of the eight addresses. Unfortunately by moving a plug at the wrong time you may corrupt the data. You could wind up with some checking account transactions written to the middle of the savings account master file. IBM didn't really promote regularly swapping plugs as standard practice but once again we had deadlines and performance ratings. The 2314 did stop the practice of using the disk cover as a brake. The drawers wouldn't open until the disk stopped spinning.

IBM 2401

Other equipment came and went but those were the main ones. All the tape drives were open reel to reel models that were hand threaded. One thing I remember was at some point we changed from IBM to another vendor for tape drives. Same technology but cheaper. The IBM drives had the take-up reel on the right. Brand X was the opposite and read right to left. Probably patent stuff. It took the operators quite a while to get used to that. You now had to thread the tape with your left hand. Not a popular move by management.

I mentioned that my first job was in the tape library. It was actually a media library and forms room. Besides tape the library stored all the disks, program decks and control cards, run manuals and carriage tapes. We also took care of the forms room where all the paper stock, card stock and consumables, like printer ribbons, were kept. The library and forms room were inside the computer room on the raised floor. It was our job to gather together all those items plus any input from other departments needed to run a particular job and take it to the proper computer. Likewise when the job was finished the operator would bring everything back to us. We'd send on whatever output went to other departments and put away all the stuff that stayed in the library. We had to know all the pieces parts for all the jobs.

Things were pretty loose on the graveyard shift, we were all male and about the same age, i.e. young. The computer operators would show us stuff. We'd put cards in the reader or take them out of the punch, change a tape or disk, put paper in the printer, etc. If you didn't screw that stuff up they'd let you enter console commands. Before long I could operate all the computers. I was never officially a computer operator but I might as well have been. I'd even fill in for most of a shift sometimes when they were shorthanded. I moved up fairly fast to shift supervisor, section manager then shift manager of the production control department. I got a good education in all the different areas.

Those were far different times. Much of the data was still on punch cards. Programmers wrote their code with a pencil on a coding sheet, different forms for different programming languages. Those sheets were sent to the keypunch department. When the whole program was transferred to cards it was sent to the computer room to be compiled. Keypunch, assemblies or compiles and testing had to be fit in between production jobs. A programmer might get one compile a day. The first one was always a mess. That one caught all the keypunch errors or sequence errors and of course the programmers errors. Sometimes there were so many errors that it would abend (abnormal end) before the assembly or compile got started. Corrections had to go back to keypunch or be keyed by the programmer, then back to the computer room for another compile. Round and round until that step came out clean. Then onto testing. Now everyone who has ever written a program knows that a clean assembly or compile has no relation to whether the program will actually do what you intended or even run at all. So test, fix, recompile, test, fix, recompile, test until it actually works. Again you may get one shot a day if you were lucky. All this on punch cards. Sure as hell if you didn't put sequence number in your source deck it would get dropped. Then you'd have to re-sequence by hand rather than take it to a card sorter for a quick and accurate job. Cards came 2,000 to a box and I've seen whole boxes dropped. Of course if you were prudent and used sequence numbers your cards never got dropped. The whole process could take a while. My one real venture into programming back then was a rogue episode one Friday night. We ran a skeleton graveyard shift on Fridays. The full computer room graveyard shift worked Sunday through Thursday. One or two operators from swing shift would work overtime. That Friday one of the banks we did processing for sent in bad data but it was bad in a consistent way. A digit in one column of about a quarter of the records needed to be changed. We could either print out a tape and keypunch all of it (bank number, account number, transaction code and dollar amount) or duplicate the tape changing the one digit in the bad records. Pretty easy program, read a record, check if it's a bad one, replace the digit, write the record. So, the operator that stayed late and I made a management decision, wrote a quick program and fixed the data. We never did tell our bosses about it. I did send a note to the bank who made the error so they wouldn't do it again but didn't explain how we fixed it. I'm sure our bosses and the auditors would have frowned on our actions but like I said, those were looser times. We felt pretty proud of ourselves and we made our deadlines. Ironically, the operator who was my partner in crime later became an auditor at the bank.

IBM 029 Key Punch

IBM 029 Program Drum

Speaking of keypunch we had a big department, all women except for the department manager. There were about 50 women on the day shift and at least 25 at night. They covered about two and a half shifts with staggered hours although if the computer room was running there was usually somebody around in case of an emergency. Now 50 people pounding on keypunch machines at the speed of light makes quite a racket. I once had the misfortune of occupying the desk right next to the door between our department and keypunch. Every time that door opened, which was often, it was deafening. Half the women who worked night shift would spend most of the night on the phone all the while keying away. I never could figure out how they could hear the conversation and concentrate on the work but they did both. Everybody could keypunch some in a pinch. There were keypunches in almost every department so people could key, fix or duplicate a few cards. Many of us knew how to make a keypunch program. It was a one card program that would instruct the machine to skip columns, define alpha or numeric and a few other things.

IBM 80 Column Punch Card

Did I mention that the bank still had over a million cards in the Tabulating (Tab) Department for applications that hadn't been converted to a real computer yet. I learned how to run all those machines too. There was also a whole different computer room and department for check processing. It was called Computerized Transit and ran all Burroughs equipment. That's another story for another day. There are many other adventures from these years. I will probably revisit this time period again and talk about more experiences, memories and technology.

After a few years I was ready to leave the bank and move on to other things. I actually turned in my resignation with plans to move back to Florida but with no job lined up. The bank made me a very good offer to stay and change positions that interested me. After some thought I accepted their offer and that took me on a whole new adventure.

This first chapter has been harder than I expected. One problem is trying to remember stuff from so long ago. The next problem is once one thing is finally remembered it triggers a million other memories. Many good and a few painful ones. There are sure to be errors and omissions, some with the technology and some with the chronology. I think there will be more chapters than I first anticipated and they may not be in chronological order. I hope you'll join me as I continue this trip down memory lane. Stay tuned for chapter 2.0 or maybe 1.1 coming soon to a blog near you.

wjh

Family Band: The Cowsills Story

by Bill Holmes

The Real Cowsills

This is sort of another of the reviews of music TV programs I did in the past few weeks. The difference is there wasn't much music in this program. This was the story of the Cowsills, a family band that had a few hits. This documentary was mostly about the Cowsill family, how they started, the years of popularity, the decline and what has happened since. There were some clips of their performances but that was not the focus. I was not a fan of the Cowsills music at the time or now. The only reason I watched it is that a local TV critic and a local newspaper music critic recommended it. The music critic actually apologized for recommending anything to do with the Cowsills.

The Cowsills was a band in the late 1960's made up of seven family members; five brothers, one sister and their Mom. They were the inspiration for The Partridge Family TV show. The show wound up outlasting the band. The Cowsills had a few hits between 1967 and 69. If you are old enough you may remember some of them, The Rain, the Park & Other Things, Indian Lake and Hair. Those songs are not terrible but they certainly weren't what I was listening to at the time.

As it turns out much of the music the Cowsills played was not what they wanted to do either. Between the record companies and a controlling father, they were forced to dumb down their music. They wanted to be a rock band but the industry and dad wanted them to be a clean cut family group.

The main theme of the documentary is how dysfunctional the family was. The undisputed villain was the father. He was a career Navy man who spent much of the time at sea. When back on shore he would try to run the family in a military manner and fix all the things he thought had gone wrong while he was away at sea. Oh, he'd also impregnate his wife. There were seven kids. Mom came across as OK, but not strong enough to stand up to or leave her husband.

During the documentary several people were interviewed including all the remaining Cowsills. The disdain for the father was universal. He was described as controlling, domineering, volatile, demeaning,  bi-polar, abusive (mental and physical), alcoholic and in general an ass hole. Sounds like a lovely man. He is also blamed for the downfall in popularity and eventual breakup of the band.

I couldn't help but think of the of the Beach Boys. Another family band that had a domineering and destructive father. They managed to survive but were severely damaged both as a band and as individuals. The Cowsills did not survive as a group and most family members were damaged.

Originally the Cowsills was made up of three then four of the brothers. After some success Mom was added then baby sister at the insistence of dear old dad. Another brother begged to be included because he couldn't stand to be left home with dad while the band was touring. The tree original brothers wanted to include the last brother too but dad wouldn't let him join. Seems there was bad blood between brother Richard and dad. The boys didn't particularly want Mom and baby sis in the group, what teenage rock and roll band would.

Their first hit was in 1967 and their last was in 1969 although they performed until 1972. During that time they were on many of the TV variety, music and talk shows. Some of the clips shown of their interviews are very interesting when viewed in light of the real family situation. Of course they were depicted as the ideal all-american family. Mom and dad were wonderful parents and everybody was happy and well adjusted. Funny to see the likes of Ed Sullivan and Mike Douglas propagating the myth.

The Ed Sullivan Show

Who knows how long the Cowsills could have stayed on top or even together but surely the father's interference hastened their demise. They allegedly had a ten show contract with The Ed Sullivan Show but after a technical glitch during the second appearance, dad cancelled the contract. This was during a time when that show was viewed by millions and an important platform for music acts. He torpedoed the opportunity for the group to star in their own summer replacement show. The exact circumstances and disagreements are somewhat in dispute but dad nixed the deal. That concept eventually became The Partridge Family with actors hired to play a Cowsills like family. He also alienated everyone in the music industry and meddled in the creative side of the band. In 1969 dad fired the oldest brother, Bill, from the band. Bill was the one who first organized the group, was the lead singer and the creative force. The other siblings said that was a devastating blow and that Bill was their Brian Wilson.  

The Fake Cowsills

If all that isn't enough he had two more shining moments. He tried to rape his own 11 or 12 year old daughter. She managed to stop him from that but suffered a beating in the process. Soon thereafter she went to live with one of her brothers. His final gift to the family was to squander all the money the band made. When they finally broke up, they were in debt. Some estimate that they made $20 million during their peak years. Not only was all the money gone but taxes had not been paid on the earnings. One brother said it took him 20 years to pay off the IRS. Remember, in 1967 when the six siblings were in the band they ranged in age from eight to 19. They had no real chance to stand up to their father.

The Cowsills Now

Not surprisingly several of the Cowsill children have had problems. Two of the brothers are dead at least indirectly due to drug and alcohol abuse. Another, the one not a band member, came back from Vietnam with a heroin addiction. The others have emotional scars and resentment. Some have continued in music mostly full time. Others have kept a hand in music while pursuing other careers. Three of the siblings occasionally perform together as the Cowsills. Ironically another sibling performs as a member of the Beach Boys touring band. A group that is the remnants of another family band from the 60's that had a domineering and abusive father. It's a small world.

I came away from the program feeling sorry for the Cowsill family. They had a bad home life and an ambushed career. I also gained some respect for their musical talent and ability. They were all self taught musicians and decent singers. They didn't want to be stuck with bubble gum music and the perfect family persona. Those were forced on them by record labels and their father. They had that one quality that is a gift of a family band, almost perfect harmony. That is a good thing. I hope the remaining Cowsills can find some peace from past demons and be happy.

Family Band: The Cowsills Story is being shown on the Showtime channels this month. It's not a happy, funny or very musical program but it is interesting. It depicts how one person can disrupt so many lives. It proves that some people should not be allowed to have kids and be parents.

wjh

Underdogs

by Bill Holmes

Why is it that we pull for the underdog? It mostly happens in sports, often in social or legal matters and sometimes in politics. This tendency to root for the underdog seems to be almost universal. It is not limited to any particular age group, ethnicity, gender, geographical area, religion or nationality. It seems to me that people all over the world tend to side with the underdog.

In Judeo-Christian cultures the underdog is portrayed often and he, there aren't many she's, is always the good guy. Moses against the Pharaoh and David vs Goliath are Old Testament underdog stories. Jesus against the Jewish elders and the Romans is another example. I would assume that Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and other religions have similar triumphant underdogs. Nationalities have their secular heroes. The Scots have William Wallace. The English have Robin Hood. The Irish have St. Patrick. I'm sure the Seminoles, Sioux and Apaches have their icons. Every nation and people seem to have these stories about underdogs triumphing over all odds. Some of the underdogs were real people and many were mythical. Some of their accomplishments were real, although often embellished, some were fabrications, although probably based on some fact.

Maybe that's why we are on the side of the underdog. It's because we hear and read these stories from our youngest days. If Mom tells you a story when you're a toddler it is in your brain forever. They are ingrained in our fabric. We are often reminded of these underdogs by teachers or holidays or sermons or an anniversary observance.

Another reason is that most of us are not in a position of power. We are at the mercy of the big corporation or government. That makes most of us the underdog in many situations. Our complicated, often impersonal, society can be frustrating. The automated customer non-service phone tree that doesn't solve your problem and never lets you speak to a human can make you crazy. The clerk at the city hall who either can't make a decision because of stupid rules or doesn't give a damn maybe because of civil service job protection will leave you frustrated. Then there is the boss who makes salary and promotion decisions based on ass kissing, how cute she is or incriminating pictures, never on ability to do the job.

It's not a giant leap to see bits of a David and Goliath story in a current situation or event. It becomes even easier when the media constantly reminds us of a potential underdog situation and hypes it. The media love to play up the downtrodden, hopeless and oppressed. When one of these stories comes around you can flip the channels and see reports from every local station. If it's a national underdog you'll see it on every news program morning, noon, evening and night. If there's a sports angle it will be on ESPN and sports radio all day every day. In sports the triumphant underdog is usually called Cinderella. This is especially true in the NCAA Basketball Tournament. Every year there is a designated Cinderella team. This year FGCU was that team.

The reason I'm writing this now is that I was recently reminded of the phenomenon. I went to the NCAA Basketball Tournament South Regionals. In the first round of the regional games, the University of Florida Gators, my team, played the Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) Eagles. The Gators were seeded #2 in the region, the Eagles were seeded #15. That alone might create an underdog situation but there were many other factors. FGCU was making it's first NCAA tournament appearance. Florida has been to 16 tournaments. They have won two national championships and this was their third trip in a row to the regional rounds (Sweet 16). Florida has one of the premier athletic departments in the country. They have won several national championships in a number of sports. Want more disparity? Florida was founded in the 1850's and has about 50,000 students and a huge alumni. FGCU was founded in the 1990's and has 12,000 students and barely any alumni. You can imagine the difference in team budgets.

FGCU vs Florida was a classic Cinderella situation. The FGCU story was on every news and sports program every day for a week leading up to the game. They were the little school that could. They were the unknown school up against the national powerhouse. Florida has several former players in the NBA, a building full of trophies, a high profile coach, world class facilities, a big budget and an alumni that holds powerful positions throughout the state and nation. FGCU has no former players in the NBA, no national trophies, an unknown coach, a gym, a small budget and a few recent alumni. Is that a fair fight? As it turns out it may be. FGCU beat #2 seed Georgetown and #7 San Diego St. to get to the game against Florida. They were the first #15 seed to make it to the round of 16.

The venue for the game, Cowboys Stadium, was full of Kansas and Michigan fans. They played the first game of the evening. There were fewer Florida and FGCU fans there, but a good contingent from each school. After Michigan beat Kansas, many of those folks left but there were still all the people from the Sunshine State and at least half of the Yankees. All the Kansas and Michigan fans who stayed for the second game immediately became FGCU fans. When the Eagles started fast the stadium was obviously on their side. Why would a bunch of folks from Michigan and Kansas root for FGCU? It's because they were the underdogs and had been hyped all week long. Once Florida took the lead the fair weather FGCU fans left.

I understand the appeal of the underdog or Cinderella. David triumphs over Goliath and we all feel better. In the case of greedy corporations or unresponsive governments, that's a good thing. In the case of sports it's not that cut and dry. It is easy to root against a $20 million a year professional athlete who is a jerk and maybe doesn't produce. Yes, the big schools have some advantages. I propose though that the athletes on those favored college teams work just as hard as those on the Cinderella teams. They care just as much about winning, get paid the same (tuition) and have the same compelling stories. In fact the tuition scholarship at a small private school is usually worth much more than at a big state university. Somehow a rich and privileged kid playing on a Cinderella team is more deserving than the poor and deprived kid who plays at a big university. I hate that the media labels college teams as Davids and Goliaths or Cinderellas and Evil Stepmothers. It turns out not to be fair to either one.

Continue to root for the underdog, it's the American way. Just be sure that the underdog is really a good  David and the odds favorite is really an evil Goliath.

wjh

TV News & Sweeps

This blog was originally posted 3/1/2013 in The Viewpoint.

by Bill Holmes

Here we are at the end of February sweeps for the TV networks. Sweeps are the thrice yearly periods when Nielson and the other TV rating agencies do extra polling and analysis of our viewing habits. These sweep periods occur in February, May and November. The extra effort ratings are used by the networks and local stations to set their advertising rates for the next few months. Sweeps also bring out the best and worst in the networks and local stations.

The sweeps don't mean quite as much to local stations in a big TV market like DFW or NYC or LA. That doesn't stop them from playing the game. Big market areas are measured daily (overnight ratings) by various means all year. Smaller markets depend more on the sweep numbers. National networks get a more complete count of total viewership as opposed to just the major markets. So of course the more complete counting of eyes brings out more intense competition.

The good part of sweeps is that the networks air first run episodes of their hit series and tend to show specials or movies in place of their bad shows. There may be a cliffhanger or two during the month. Series crossover episodes are a good possibility. It's the time of year when the NCIS guys from Washington show up to help the NCIS: Los Angeles team. A CSI: NY cop may track a criminal to Las Vegas because they can't go to Miami this season, Horatio Caine and his sunglasses got canceled. The bad part is that many of those specials and most news shows are sensationalized. All are over hyped.

Some of the worst offenders are the local 10:00 PM, 11:00 in the east, news broadcasts. The investigative reporters we haven't seen in weeks are suddenly all over the screen with shocking findings. There are promos all during the day, teasers during the 5:00 and 6:00 news broadcasts all with a promise of life changing information. If you take these reports to heart, you will never leave your house again. There are dangers everywhere. Restaurants, grocery stores, packing houses and farmers are trying to kill us. Every merchant is trying to cheat us and every service provider who comes to our house will come back later to burglarize your home.

I'm not denying that some of these investigative reports provide useful information. There are bad guys out there and some companies do not provide safe products or the service they promised. What bothers me is the sensationalism of the reports and the constant teases during the day. The promos have compelling video and doomsday voice overs. The hype is outrageous and doesn't belong in a news organization. The big payoff is usually far from life changing.

One recent story on a local station was about contamination on drink cans. They included soda and energy drinks. I didn't see any of the most important canned beverage, beer. There were sensationalized promos for a couple of days. The reporters bought random canned beverages for the test. There was the required swabbing of the can tops by gloved laboratory professionals. The swabs were dramatically rubbed on to culture dishes. The samples were grown in a professional lab with professional lab employees. They were analyzed by professional scientists. When checked, the culture dishes were full of bacteria. We had proof of the bacteria because an ultraviolet light was shined on the culture dishes and it glowed brilliantly. There was a multipage lab report, held up by the reporter, to go with the ultraviolet pictures. Very dramatic and convincing unless you know that bacteria is everywhere. In the last few seconds of the report, there was a statement from a medical doctor saying that the bacteria found was not dangerous to most people. This looked suspiciously to me like a cover their ass statement to avoid any legal actions by the beverage companies. After that last brief statement that negated most of the manufactured crisis the investigative reporter had a little happy talk with the anchors. They made comments about how gross it all was and of course ignored the doctor's comments that torpedoed the story. Oh, the solution to this national crisis was to rinse off the top of the can. Who would have ever thought of that without this gripping news report? I should point out that the investigative reporters at this station have recently been named the iTeam. Expect a lawsuit from Apple any day now.

The local news outlets are not the only purveyors of this hype. 60 Minutes, 20/20, Dateline, Rock Center and any other news magazine I missed tend to rev it up a gear. The star anchors of the network evening news programs don't take nights off during sweep months.

Not being a TV marketing genius I can't tell you if these bait and switch stories work to pump up the ratings. I don't know if people care that Diane Sawyer, Brian Williams or Scott Pelley, rather than a substitute, is at the anchor desk for a full month. I do know that new episodes of entertainment programs I usually watch will increase my likelihood of viewing.

With today's technology, it seems archaic that we still have sweep months. As mentioned, major markets like D/FW are measured every day. Those results are available the next day. Many smaller markets ratings are available within a week. Why would an advertiser pay rates based on a one month sample when the networks and stations stack the deck and are putting their best stuff on the air? Those viewer numbers have to be greater than the average over the course of a season. Why are November, February and May more important than October, January and April?

Other changes in the landscape are the use of DVRs and that cable networks don't follow the normal September to May TV schedule. New shows and series are liable to pop up at any time on the calendar. They don't seem to be particularly concerned about sweeps. With a DVR that special sweeps program in February may not be watched until April and certainly not on the same day of the week or time it originally aired. Bet you'll skip over the commercials too.

The second point of this blog is how do you choose which news to watch? I'm mostly talking about the morning (5:00 to 9:00 AM) and evening (5:00 to 6:30 and 10:00 PM) broadcast news. The cable news stations are far too partisan for this debate.

I live in the Fort Worth-Dallas area, the number five TV market, so I have a better choice of news than many. I have often been amazed at how bad the local news programs are when I travel. DFW has all the usual ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC affiliates plus some independent and Spanish language stations. Over 25 plus years here my primary local news station preference has changed a few times. Anchors change and so do news directors and marketing gurus.

I think the most important factor in local news is who are the people delivering the news, weather and sports. It's rare when all three are your favorite but if it happens, you are hooked. It also depends on the lead in and lead out programs. For years one local station had a huge rating advantage at 5:00 because the news followed Oprah. The CBS affiliate has an advantage now at 10:00 because of the strong CBS prime time lineup.

Still, anchors matter. I used to watch one local early morning news program almost exclusively. They changed the weather person, not as good but OK. They changed one of the news anchors, OK. Another weather and another anchor change. Then they changed the traffic reporter and weather person again. Well, to me the new weather guy is unwatchable

and the traffic reports are boring. Changed stations and there was the guy that got fired from my former favorite station. He and his co-anchor are good, the weather guy is watchable and the traffic reporter is both competent and attractive. It may also help that it leads into the CBS This Morning show which is now my preferred network morning show. I like Charlie and Nora although the main reason I watch is because it's more news oriented. I don't really care to watch segments on fashion or makeovers or cooking at 7:00. I also can't stand to watch or listen to Savannah Guthrie.

At 5:00, 6:00 and 10:00 PM it's a little more difficult. In my opinion, three of the four local newscasts are OK. Unfortunately, I think the anchors are better and have more integrity than their bosses. I see them wince sometimes while reporting a story. All three of the news anchor pairs are competent, the weather guys OK and the sports guys are good. The field reporters are OK too for the most part. I'd like to be completely objective in my news choices but since they all report the same stuff does it really matter? I usually watch one station at 5:00 and a different one at 6:00 just to get some contrast. The local CBS affiliate usually gets the nod at 10:00 because I'm more likely to be watching a CBS prime time program and because it leads into Letterman. I'll also occasionally watch the Fox newscast (the local affiliate, not Fox News Channel) at 9:00 PM.

I hate the intrusion of sweeps and marketing and hype into TV news. I don't like it much in the network prime time shows either although that is harmless. As cable channels with their unconventional seasons increase we may soon see the end of sweeps as we know it. There is also the new paradigm introduced by Netflix. They released the whole season, 13 episodes, of House of Cards at one time. You can watch it one episode at a time, a 13 hour marathon or any other combination.

My guess is that in a few years most media content will be consumed on-demand via the internet. There will be no need for these occasional sweep spikes in content. Every program will be tracked at the moment of download or consumption.

If you want to promo and hype a future TV series or special or movie that's OK. If you have news that is important and informational to the public then report it. Any news that the networks or local stations promo and delay is not that important. If it was really important, every station would be either breaking into normal programming or leading their next newscast with the story. Remember, being first with the story is almost as important as being accurate to most news organizations.

I don't remember ever seeing a promo for the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite or the Huntley-Brinkley Report. I also don't remember poorly researched sensationalized fluff reports during sweeps. I know times change and many people no longer watch TV news and those that do probably already know the big stories of the day. They have seen it on the internet.

Choose your own favorite news source, be it TV, internet, newspaper or town crier, but please choose a source or two or twelve. We all need to be informed about our world. It's also a good idea to get at least a second opinion or slant on the news. If you're a Fox News fan, maybe watch a little MSNBC or vice versa. It can be painful but it may make you stop and think about an issue rather than just nodding approval. There is even some real news value in the Daily Show and Colbert Report or a late night talk show monologue. Don't be afraid to check out that story that supports your beliefs in Snoops.com or one of the other debunking websites. Be curious, be skeptical, be informed. Enjoy all the reruns and substitute anchors in March too. Just wait, the anchors, investigative reporters, new episodes and more hype will be back in May.

wjh