SIG 4
Page 17

 can imagine. Is that what Pat said?

H: He said he had to basically lobby for this computer. He worked for IBM, so he
 was familiar with computers. This was in the early part of the 1970s. The first
 thing [he saw] when he walked in was Mr. Brown on the floor, sorting city
 ledgers, by hand.

M: That's what I mean, a pen-and-ink [kind of man].

H: He said that their accounting machines were hand-cranked, and he thought it
 was a museum he [had] walked into. This is his first day on the job.

M: When I was at Troy State, I was in education, business, and music. I definitely
 didn't have a focus on life at that point. One of the classes I took was business
 machines. Oh, Lord, am I dating myself. I walked into this business machine
 class and it was these gigantic key punch machines. Do you remember key
 punch machines? Oh, my Lord. They had key punch operators at Sea Island,
 back then. They sat there all day long. [You] Talk about carpal tunnel [An
 inflammatory condition of a joint from repetitive motion]. They sat there all day
 long key punching in these cards. [It was] loud. These data cards would go
 through and they'd punch those little things, the chads. They'd punch the chads
 out, and that's what made the computer read the things. They did that. There
 were these huge machines, and these adding machines that had twenty-five
 columns on them. It's just amazing. Now, you've got a computer this big that
 will do anything.

H: [Pat Talley, SIG 2] was saying that they conducted a class to teach how to work
 the computer, which is not anything like a computer we think of, today. He said
 that Mr. Brown had delayed getting the computer for about two years. It took
 him that long. His strategy, therefore, became to take the people who were
 afraid of it to lunch and he would explain to them that they were not going to be
 without a job.

M: Everybody thought that computers were going to replace bodies. Little did they
 know that it took a body to run the thing. Data in, data out. It's got to get in
 there, somehow. One of the first young girls that he ever hired, her name was
 Katie Hibbler. This morning, I got out of my car, and Katie was on her
 motorcycle. She is a very progressive lady. She goes to my church. She was
 on her motorcycle and she drove around the building and used our ATM
 [automatic teller machine] this morning. I got out of my car and went and spoke
 to her. She still is a member of the credit union. She works at the hospital now.


H: He [Pat Talley] said the same computer that Sea Island eventually got, [though] it