B&O's Datamation 1000 Commercial Computer By Geoff Fuller

The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was a leader in the installation of commercial computers in an industrial setting. Howard Simpson was President of the B&O. His decision to install a computer symbolized the progressiveness of the B&O in the late 1950s. His goal was to lower rail administrative, back-office expenses, through aggressive but not proven early computer technology. Simpson knew that there was definitely risk with these new computing machines.

B&O's use of the Datamatic-1000 was at least one year behind the C&O’s UNIVAC computer in Cleveland and the Southern Railway, with an IBM 705 in Washington, DC. Bill Dixon, Bob Fetter and Bob Dischinger toured these other railroads to develop ‘lessons learned’ notes to learn from the other railroads’ successes and avoid their failures.

B&O early computer adapters were innovators in systems and procedures simply because every process was new for commercial organizations. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company developed procedures for magnetic tape labeling, storage, shipping and protection from humidity, temperature and physical, electrical, fire or other damage. Processes were developed to generate labels in computer programs used for magnetic tape assignment, tape storage in closed file-type cabinets and air-conditioned atmosphere for humidity and temperature control. Blazing new computer trails was the order of the day for the B&O computer pioneers.

We could be so bold as to compare these B&O computer enablers to space age scientists. They developed scientific problem-solving methods to deal with new computer development business processes.

D 1000 Investment Justification

Gus King, one of the D 1000 pioneers, suggested that the D 1000 was justified on the basis of management and clerical position reductions. Gus recalls that in the late 1940s, the B&O had 60,000 employees. There was significant labor intensity in the operating departments as steam locomotives remained the primary power mode. A small army of clerks maintained the vital revenue and operating records of their day.

Manufactured by Minneapolis-Honeywell Regulator Company. The Datamatic Division was located in Newton, Massachusetts.
Honeywell entered the computer field by taking minority interests (40%) in Datamatic co-founded with Raytheon in Newton and Waltham, Massachusetts, with Walter Finke (Honeywell) as CEO. In 1957, Honeywell acquired the part of Raytheon in Datamatic and developed in the 1950s and the early 1960s. Until the 1960s, the producer of the series 400 and 800 was named The Datamatic Division of Honeywell (Minneapolis).

Datamatic 1000 was a vacuum tube computer developed in 1956. Tubes generated significant heat and were prone to failure, just like old radios that we used in our homes. Try to purchase a vacuum tube today. I remember taking burned-out tubes to a drug store. You could test your tube and purchase a new tube at the drug store.

D 1000 computers were installed at five sites. Computers in non-military applications were rare in the 1950s.
1. Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company: Located on the 10th Floor, B&O Central Building, Baltimore, Maryland, the system was used for payroll, freight revenue accounting and car accounting. The B&O D 1000 was installed in 1957.
2. First National Bank of Boston: Located at the Main Office in Boston, Massachusetts, the system was used for Deposit Accounting, Check Reconcilement and Corporate Trust Accounting.
3. Michigan Hospital Service: Located on the 6th Floor at 441 E. Jefferson, Detroit, Michigan, the system was used for daily maintenance of subscriber records and verification of hospital and medical benefits, premium billing, premium accounting and statistics, and claim accounting and statistics.
4. Minneapolis-Honeywell Regulator Co.-TCG Division: Located at 2753 4th Avenue South, Minneapolis, Minnesota, the system was used for payroll, account distribution, accounting ledgers, factory labor efficiency, file maintenance, sales statistics, factory scheduling, standard cost calculation and inventory extension.
5. U.S. Treasury Department: Located on the 2nd floor at 214 Seventh Street, Parkersburg, West Virginia. Operations were concerned with the issuance and retirement of Series E, United States Savings Bonds in punched card form sold to the public beginning October 1, 1957.
Decision Process

Doug Turnbull, B&O VP of Research and Development in the late 1940s, was the driving force behind the D 1000 study group and eventually the ROI justification for this new business machine, called a “digital computer”. This was a bold and risky project for a VP to back as computers were unknown to all businesses.

Mr. Turnbull was tasked by President Simpson that the railroad’s cost basis had to be reduced. Bill Dixon was the “brains” behind the scene in VP Turnbull’s office. Cliff Strickland, who worked for Doug, was tasked by Mr. Turnbull to select and install a computer on the B&O. Cliff was an early systems and methods guy. He had a background in early IBM punch card equipment. These machines could generate simple reports. But the IBM punched card machines were very labor intensive, with limited logical processing, such as branching.

IBM and Sperry Rand/Univac products were among the logical computer vendor candidates. Bill Dixon, while on vacation in Connecticut, traveled to Newton, Massachusetts, to meet with the Raytheon and Minneapolis-Honeywell team who were developing the D-1000. The D-1000 was an upgraded follow-up to computers Raytheon had developed and sold for military applications. Bill Dixon came back to Baltimore and made the case for the D-1000...which the selection committee then accepted and recommended to another higher level committee who accepted this choice immediately. IBM particularly jumped into action and attempted to discredit this “offbeat” recommendation...but the B&O management group stood behind their selection team.

Unlike most other railroads who embraced the IBM party-line, C&O/B&O developed a clear anti-IBM posture throughout computer vendor selection in follow-on years. They opted for what they considered “the best vendor” no matter the pressure exerted by IBM.

Here is an excerpt from H. Roger Grant’s RABO-underwritten biography of Jervis Langdon, Jr., Visionary Railroader;
“Even though his skills were not appreciated by the Simpson administration, he made important contributions. One involved computers. Not until the late 1950s did a few railroads take notice of the dawning computer age. But Dixon was convinced that the B&O needed to utilize this developing technology and carefully considered the options. Believing that DATAmatic Corporation, jointly owned by Raytheon and Honeywell, produced the best product, he used personal vacation time to explore details at DATAmatic's headquarters outside Boston. Dixon then recommended that the B&O invest $1.5 million in this giant first-generation computer, “the last of the broad-gauge computers with its three-inch tapes.” Although IBM complained to B&O officials, disparaging Dixon's judgment, the DATAmatic-1000 was superior to the comparable IBM 705, in part due to its ability to read tapes backwards. It would not be until 1970, more than a decade after installation of this equipment on the tenth floor of company headquarters, that this machine was retired. The DATAmatic-1000 would do yeoman's service with such tasks as interline and freight-car accounting and payroll processing.”

Cliff Strickland was Manager-Methods and Procedures. He and his staff worked with the operating groups to improve field processes, focusing on office systems and processes. Their goal was to identify quick payback opportunities where new office techniques could be quickly “rolled out” to support field sites.

Cliff hired new people to form the nucleus of the D 1000 project team. Putt Morgan, Robert (Bob) Dischinger and Bill Prinn were hired or promoted to join the D 1000 team.

About this time, the systems and programming teams were being put together; about half were B&O's staffers drawn from several different departments. Another portion of these teams was drawn from sources like recent college graduates, other companies around Baltimore [e.g. Jack King] and some military retirees.

Cliff Strickland and Put Morgan interviewed Bob Fetter in May of 1957. Bob accepted a job offer in Baltimore, starting about the same time as Jim Mosher, June 25, 1957. Bob became one of the key players in the installation and development of the D-1000 computer. Bob initially worked with Bob Dischinger’s Standards Group, a team preparing for the day when the computer would be installed and running in Baltimore. The team’s mission was the………
Alignment ….. Transition ….. Transformation of the B&O RR

The stage was now set for the computer installation team to move aggressively move forward to transform largely manual processes into digital computer programs. This was a bold new world for our earlier rail colleagues.

Staffing

Bob Dischinger was project manager for the payroll application team.

Bill Prinn was involved with developing early computer processes to support headquarters and field offices.

Bob and Putt Morgan supervised construction of the physical facility in the B&O headquarters Central Building in downtown Baltimore. Ed Fritz remembers that the machine, with its support and peripheral equipment, occupied three floors in the Central Building. Tape drives measured four feet wide, five feet tall and two feet deep. There were ten of these tape drives. Ed remembers that the tape spindles weighed 32 lbs. They looked like VW automobile tires. Gus King reinforced Ed’s memory by suggesting that computer operators were a very physically-fit group.

The printer and related gear were located on the 11th floor.

Storage records on magnetic tape.

Tapes were 3 inches wide and were mounted on heavy aluminum wheels and required great strength to mount them on the computer’s tape drives. Bill Sheridan thinks that only weight lifters were hired as computer operators.

Unlike today’s computers, the D 1000 had no mass storage hardware to support random access capabilities. This was a drastic limitation for the programming staff. Historical information (master files) was sorted by a key field; for example employee name and number for payroll. Then, new employee time and attendance records had to be sorted by employee name and number. New transactions were sequentially matched to the master file. Current employee payroll data was written to the historical master file.
Another example was that online rail car movement tracing (current and historical car moves) was not possible. Car movement records were handled manually by thousands of clerks. This process was labor intensive and was a very expensive proposition.

D 1000 projects were organized around Analysts and Programmers. Russ Clarke was a Programmer Manager. Jack Campbell was a Systems Designer. Programmers were assigned to each Designer. Programmers included Ed Fritz, Gus King, Kirk Kingston and Jim Backard.

Programs were written in machine level language which was very difficult to learn. Instructions were numeric. Ed Fritz remembers that the number “824” was a compare field instruction. Programs were written on paper forms and then these instructions were punched into cards. These “punched cards” were then entered into the D 1000 computer through a “card reader” machine. Writing programs in machine level language was an exact science. Program debugging required patience and absolute attention to detail.

Terms like “debugging program code” were introduced into the office lexicon in the B&O Central Building.

Programmers wrote machine level code on paper
Machine level code was entered into punched cards
Punched cards were entered into the D 1000 via card readers
Programmers debugged programs

D 1000 Power, Space, Weight and Site Preparation

Power;:computer 230 KVA. Volume: computer 67,500 cu ft. Area: computer 7,500 sq ft. Floor loading: 60 lbs/sq ft. Weight: computer 123,000 lbs

Air-conditioning system packaged units included 35 tons built into the computer, 16 tons for the Tape File Room, 8 tons for High Speed Printer and personnel and 5 tons for personnel in the Central Processor Room.

The IBM 407 Accounting Machine (1949) was the last and best of the all-electromechanical IBM accounting machines, previously known as “tabulators”. The 407 read a deck of punched cards on its integrated card reader, accumulated totals, subtotals, or other simple statistics in counters made of gears and printed the results on its integrated 132-column line printer.

The 407 control panel was about 16 inches square with metal rim and grasping handle, containing a matrix of holes sectioned off into functional areas with small labels printed in white. To program the machine to do a particular task (such as read a deck of cards, print each card in a certain format, add up the numbers in columns 40-48 and print the total), jumper wires of various lengths and colors were inserted to connect pairs of holes. Different programs could be easily swapped in and out.

The IBM 519 Document-Originating Machine, introduced in 1946, was the last in a series of unit record machines designed for automated preparation of punched cards. It could…

reproduce all or parts of the information on a set of cards.
“gangpunch” - copy information from a master card into the following detail cards.
print up to eight digits on the end of a card.
compare two decks of cards.
summary punch information provided by a connected accounting machine.

It operated at 100 cards per minute. Operations of the 519 were directed by removable control panels which were programmable like the IBM 407.

B&O D 1000 Business Applications

The D 1000 programming was segmented into three teams of System Analysts and Programmers.

Freight revenue accounting.
Car accounting: sometimes referred to as Car Service Group, was headed-up by Vic Gairoard
Payroll.

The payroll application was a driving force behind the financial decision to install a commercial computer on the B&O Railroad in the late 1940s. Remember that the B&O’s employee base had expanded to 60,000 employees. President Simpson realized that decisive action had to be taken to reduce labor-intensive processes around his railroad. Payroll was identified as “easy pickings” to lower the B&O’s cost basis.

Payroll was the first application on the B&O’s D 1000 computer. Bob Dischinger was hired by Cliff Strickland as his Payroll Project Manager.

Each B&O field office had its payroll “experts” who positioned themselves to be indispensable to the field’s payroll systems. Employees had to be paid on-time and accurately or else there would be immediate labor repercussions. Shut-downs were a constant threat by the labor unions. Union leaders had to demonstrate their worth to their dues-paying membership.

The regional offices, located in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and Baltimore, collected time and attendance documents for all operating and non-op departments. Regional offices then ran time-to-gross (TTG) applications on inefficient IBM punched card equipment to process payrolls to produce checks, reports and statistics. This was no small feat as payroll rules had to include such factors as: company policy; state laws that varied wildly from state-to-state; and federal IRS rules – laws. Complying with Railroad Retirement Board rules was onerous and they were always changing. Various organizations had “claims”, such as wage garnishments, on the B&O payroll process.

Labor organizations also had their hooks in the payroll processes. The B&O had to withhold union dues from employee wages.
These gross records that were generated on IBM card equipment were sent to Baltimore. The central Baltimore payroll office then created gross-to-net payroll checks and records. Checks were then sent back to the regional office for distribution to employees. As you can imagine, there were too many “trip wires” which could disrupt the payroll process. There was a significant risk in the card-based payroll systems.

Bob Dischinger, as the Payroll Project Manager, promoted Gus King, who was a Payroll Clerk in Cincinnati, to a Programmer for the new D 1000. Will Koerner, George Clark, Jack Harbert and Barney Corbett were hired as Programmers. A crucial component of the Honeywell contract included a provision to train B&O programmers. Keep in mind that the B&O computer project managers could not hire experienced people as they did not exist. Programmer training was baked into the contract with Honeywell.

Centralizing payroll into a single site was a significant undertaking at best. Add to that task the utilization of an untried business machine: the D 1000 computer. Bob Dischinger and his payroll team had to build employee master files and provisions to easily update employee records. All of the complex tax laws and payroll arithmetic had to be dealt with in the programs. Remember that state tax laws were all different and were complex. Programming Railroad Retirement Board (RRB) rules was a monumental undertaking. Arcane rules had to be programmed into the D 1000. Payroll ledgers and pay accumulators were also a part of the payroll project. W2 ledgers were reported on the D 1000.

Processing RRB payroll rules remains a challenging task for current (2011) software firms such as SAP and ADP. (Geoff Fuller’s experience based on consulting assignments) Many kudos to Gus King and the payroll group for their early RRB tax accomplishments. Good show, Gus! Gus held this payroll MIS Payroll project manager until his retirement in 1985.

Payroll databases on the D 1000 provided rich information that could be utilized by the Finance Department’s analytical folks. Early cost and analytical analysis can be traced back to Bob Dischinger and Gus King and the other payroll project folks.

We are also pleased to share with you that Jack Campbell is very content in his current project, “Retired”.

Vendor Support.

Bob Fetter remembers vendor support folks like Lyman Stewart, Dudley Carlton, Bill “Doc” Eastman and Tom Alex, who were assigned to the B&O from Honeywell. It was common practice for computer vendors to have dedicated technical support people ‘on-site’ to assist their customer staff people.

Labor Relations

Some of the departments were reluctant to work with the D 1000 teams. The rumor mill ran wild that clerical positions would be eliminated after their clerical work was performed on this new computer thing. There was great fear and clerks were not cooperative. Finally, a B&O executive had to promise that good-paying railroad jobs would not be lost. Office clerks then began to work with the computer teams.

D 1000 Backup

The railroad’s lawyers were renowned for crafting contracts that protected the B&O. Their creativeness carried over to the contract with Honeywell. Cliff Strickland had a clause in the Honeywell contract that they had to provide a backup machine for the B&O’s D 1000. B&O actually exercised the backup provision and we insisted that Honeywell maintain a hot standby computer site throughout the life of our D 1000. This was no small expense since the B&O D 1000 was utilized for over a decade. ED Fritz remembers packing up the heavy, bulky magnetic tapes in a truck, then driving to Boston to run B&O programs on the backup computer. He recalls that the backup computer had to be dusted off before it would run.

Honeywell sponsored a party in 1967 when the B&O’s D 1000 was finally decommissioned. According to Bill Sheridan, they were elated to get out of the expensive backup provision. They gave souvenir computer parts to the B&O, such as tape drives. Some of these souvenirs adorned conference room walls in the newly-created Planning Department in Jacksonville. One of the B&O tape drives was donated to the Smithsonian Institute in 1967.

Personnel requirements

The B&O D 1000 operated one eight-hour shift, 42.3 hours per week.

The staff included;
Supervisors
Analysts and Programmers
Librarians
Computer Operators

Methods of computer training used included a combination of the manufacturer’s formal sessions and informal on-job training.
Ed Fritz recalls that Lyman Stewart, a Honeywell employee, was stationed at the B&O to assist the railroad with the installation and running of the D 1000. This consulting effort was backed into the B&O’s contract with Honeywell.

Will Koerner shared the following scenario about a disgruntled computer Operator:
“On occasions, the computer and program operation would fail, causing the computer to shut down. The Datamatic engineers could not find the reason and thought someone was causing the problem. The failure always happened when the B&O’s 4 pm shift reported to work. The B&O police from Pittsburgh were called in and dusted the keys on the panel that indicated if a key were thrown. They also set up a camera and alarm system if a key was thrown and reset. True to form, a worker reporting to work was caught in the act. The worker was released from B&O Service stating he was disgruntled because he did not get the job he thought he deserved. No charges were filed against the employee.”

Music, Music, Music

Let it never be said that early B&O computer people were not sociable or whimsical. The D 1000 would emanate tones at the Operator’s console (control center). Clyde Boller, a D 1000 Programmer, programmed the D 1000 to sound out “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad”. Over the Christmas period, Clyde programmed the D 1000 to play (sound out) Christmas music.

Bob Dischinger, ever the disciplined manager, did not share the enthusiasm for playing music on “his computer”. It was not uncommon for Bob to un-ceremonially ask people to leave “his computer room”. Bob was fiercely loyal to the B&O over his years of service. It was not unusual for Bob Dischinger to challenge computer vendors to the point that they “cried uncle”. Bob made vendors perform up to and beyond the terms of very demanding computer operating performance levels.

Project Almost Cancelled

The D-1000 was almost cancelled or postponed as a consequence of the 1957-58 recession which took its toll on rail traffic. There were selective staff cutbacks in several departments. Methods Research & Procedures was asked to eliminate one position. Jim [rest of name not shared here] came back around 3:00 pm from a prolonged, many drinks, lunch---just at the moment a candidate needed to be selected. Wrong day for a long lunch!

In that same 1957-58 recession, the old Pennsylvania Railroad discontinued their entire computer systems department. Thereby, they lost several years and were in catch-up mode in the 1960s. This contributed to their being a weaker partner coming into the merger with the New York Central and the result, aided by other problems, was the almost immediate bankruptcy of the Penn Central.

Was D 1000 a Commercial Success?

Gus King remembers that the first railroad computer was a major success. The B&O’s investment in the computer project was driven by a passion to lower an ever-expanding employee base. Field processes were replete with passionate employees driven to protect their home turf.

Through the efforts of a few talented computer pioneers, the computer project, along with some other major industry changes such as dieselization, reduced B&O employee staffing, from a high level of 60,000 in the late 1940s, down to 35,000 in the late 1950s. That’s an amazing reduction of 25,000 positions, or 42%, in one decade.

The D-1000 also demonstrated that centralization of administrative and operating functions could be successfully achieved at single or regional sites. The D-1000 confidence factors led to the Terminal Services Center concept where further clerical cost reductions were realized.

Today, your cell phone has more computing capability than the D-1000. It is hard to comprehend that in our lifetimes we witnessed and participated in such a transformation in the railroads’ way of doing business and, likewise, for the world as a whole.

Thanks to all of those mentioned in this article who were of great help in putting together this story.