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Component Manufacturing dverti$er
Joe Kannapell - Senior VP MiTek Industries, Inc. www.mii.com
Adverti$er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
September 2018 #10230 Page #8
Celebrating 50 Years of Truss Design Part II: Leaps Forward in Computerization
N
one of us would forget the strange sounds that signaled a new era in truss design: the pounding of the keypunch, the whirring of the card reader, and the ratcheting of the line printer that emanated from the 10x10 room in front of our drafting bullpen. Yet, when you walked into that room to submit a coding sheet, not a sound came from the desk-sized device that triggered those actions, the IBM 1130; only a series of flashing lights. When I arrived on the scene in 1970, that machine was efficiently cranking out truss designs, one every couple of minutes, changing the truss world.
But it took two prior years of hard work by the engineers who sat in the back of the bullpen to get the 1130 going, all while coping with the onslaught of increasingly complicated truss requests coming through our office. Those stalwarts faced even more pressing deadlines than I faced when I ran the department a dozen years later. Tempers were short during the run-up to 2.4 Million housing starts, magnified by the unreliability our only delivery option, the U.S. Mail. When we finally got designs to our customers, they still had to hand calculate cutting lists. Thus the urgency to gain more productivity from the computer – which continues today.
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