The Second Exodus – Israel – CCL. The Ma’abarot Stage (26 of 26)
Date Posted: September 26th, 2013
A Census in the Holy Land
This is not the biblical census! Despite the insinuations of my children to the effect that I go back a long time, I can assure you that I was born many centuries later! Nevertheless, for those of you who are still young, this census technology will appear quite ancient.
Towards the end of the ‘50s, Israel was busy taking a census. And I was lucky to be sent to the data center for an interview.
The manager was blown away by my enthusiasm. I asked so many questions, he amusingly pointed out that he was interviewing me, and not the other way around. To my expression of concern as to how it was possible to complete such a mammoth task in such a short time, he assured me that, thanks to a brand new technology, the job would be completed on time.
My enthusiasm practically guaranteed that I would be hired, and I was.
The first item on the agenda was a tour of the center.
First was the keypunch room where everything started. There, cards were punched with the information provided by the citizens. Each card was verified by a modified keypunch machine called the verifier. An erroneous card was rejected and re-punched again. This ensured that a minimum of errors went through. I will talk about the other machines next; but first a word about the punched card.
The punched card is somewhat complex to describe. Vertically (it has 80 columns) it has the numbers 0 to 9; horizontally (it has 10 lines) the numbers are repeated again as 0 0 0, 1 1 1 and so on. A place is reserved for the alphabet in the middle. The operator punches the information on a keyboard and (rectangular) holes are produced accordingly. The actual information is also automatically typed on top. How the data is arranged on the card remains a mystery to me to this day. I guess this was the job of the programmer. You guessed by now that the hole (or its absence) allowed a current to go, or not to go, through. Same principle as the “on and off” of our modern computers.
The punched card died sometimes between the mid to the late 1980s. It was used for data processing and programming. A card was produced for each line of code in the program. With thousands of lines for even a modest program, a great number of cards were used. Today programs have millions of lines; mercifully, cards are no longer used, otherwise, there would be no trees left on the planet!
The punched card was one of our most amazing inventions. It has been used since the 19th century. Censuses and many other modern processes would not have been practical without it. Even after computers were invented, it remained an important tool.
After the job offer, I asked when I was starting; the answer was, “right now.” And I was assigned to one of the sorters.
The sorter sort through a variety of fields in accordance to the requirements of the job at hand. Let’s take as an example sorting by Social Insurance Numbers (SIN). A SIN has nine numbers; therefore, first I sorted through the first number or field. Once this field was in sequence, I repeated the operation all over again for the second field, and so on. Even though the machine was very fast, it took a lot of time to process just one field. Sorting was therefore a time consuming task, and accordingly many workers were assigned to the sorters.
A card came to me many times. The next sort could be by surname. The following one would be by codes; examples: by city, by occupation such as farming, by income, etc.
Sorting was the lowest task on the totem pole. Nevertheless, it drove the sorter nuts. Any mistake and my sorting was ruined and had to be repeated. It’s not so bad if I am still sorting the first field, however, if I am on, say, the fifth field, it’s a disaster. Another problem occurred if I didn’t feed my cards properly and the machine shredded them to pieces. Let me assure that the keypunch supervisor was not a happy camper when I went to her with a bunch of shredded cards.
Other machines were even more maddening. You really had to focus on your work. The least error could create havoc. It’s not for nothing that IBM provided us with many signs with the word “THINK.”
After all those years, these are the machines (and their functions to the best of my recollection) that I remember.
The collator. It consolidated all the cards sorted out by the different sorting operators.
The merger. It merged cards by groups; for example, all the people living on mochavim (collective farms)
The calculator. The merged cards were handed to an operator (there was only one such specialist) who used them to provide a total for a group. Following the above example, how many individuals live on mochavim? This operator eventually provided the overall total for the country.
The printer. This individual (again, there was only one such specialist) had the most demanding job. He printed all the reports, and an overall report that eventually found its way in the census book. This employee was the most knowledgeable and the go-to person if you had a tough problem.
The above four machines were controlled by a side panel. For each new job, the operator took the panel out and re-plugged the different wires. This was a very exacting task, since it controlled the machine. The least error caused a major screw-up. Many a time, the printer operator got funny results and cursed a blue streak.
(The sorter was simply controlled by levers that you moved back and forth according to the field(s) you wanted to sort).
One day, during coffee break, the printer person told us that, in America, they were working on an “electronic brain” which would one day do all the tasks that we were now doing. And, with a sweep of his arm around the room, he said, “everything here will be replaced by one machine!” Everybody was skeptic, but he was prepared for that. Out of his briefcase, he extracted a magazine, and opened it at the appropriate page. The only problem was that it was in English, and nobody read English except for him and me. Therefore, it fell upon me to read the article and translate it into Hebrew. Everybody was silent while I read this new revelation! Judging from the article, this “brain” was far from being ready. None of us therefore was in danger of losing his job any time soon!
Despite all the difficulties, and the stone-age tools, the census was completed with an acceptable delay.
When the manager received the census book signed by the Minister, he gathered us all around him and said: “This is the result of our hard work,” and with a look around the room at the machines which were now silent, “and the fruit of this amazing technology.”
This then is how it was done in those faraway days. Take a good look at your computer, and never, ever, take it for granted.
Sources
1) Even Yehuda
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Even-Yehuda
2) Kfar Saba
www.govisitisrael.com/kfar-saba/154/
3) The Jewish Agency Decades of Service to the Jewish People
http://www.jafi.org.il/JewishAgency/English/About/History/
4) Jewish Virtual Library The Histadrut
www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/source/History/histadrut.html
5) Histadrut
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histadrut
6) Gale Encyclopedia of the Mideast & N. Africa: Histadrut
www.answers.com/topic/histadrut
7) Health Services Kuppat Holim Clalit
www.clalit-global.co.il/en/_the_story_of_clalit_health_services
8) Israeli system of government
En.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli-system-of-government
9) Information about Israel: Government
www.science.co.il/Government.php
10) List of political parties in Israel – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/list_of_political_parties_in_Israel
11) Political Parties in Israel
http://www.science.co.il/Parties.asp
12) History of the Jews in Poland
