Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Financial 2

Financial 2                    By Mr. Bob Gumbinner

When we designed the 137 Alexander St. building in 1968, we included a room for a computer. Our first computer was a magnetic drum RAM. Liquid nitrogen was needed to keep the CPU cool. Input was done by punched cards. There was a bank of magnetic tapes to store data and to change the program hard wired boards had to be changed. A few years later we went to an IBM business computer. In 1972, Polychrome bought the 2 Ashburton Ave. property from Mr. Halpern for $910,000.

(KS note      I remember the first electronic calculator purchased at $3000 in late 60' was the opening of the computer era.         When Tore Harms was in the Yonkers production he promoted the use of computer in production.        This early effort met difficulty due to the failing of the computer company he was dealing with (I believe it was called Prime Computer).       He may not have support of the data processing department using Univac and then IBM computer for the financial data processing.)