I ran across a brochure from Watkins Agri the other day that
had a graphic representing the output from a computer program I had written many
years ago. Watkins Products based in
Winona Minnesota best known for consumer products such as their vanilla also had
an agricultural division for many years.
When I worked there as a computer programmer/operator I wrote a program
in Turbo Pascal language to create a graph representing milk production in
relation to feed additives that Watkins sold.
This would seem to be a good application for a spreadsheet program like
Excel but there must have been a reason for not going that route at that time.
It was later converted to run through a spreadsheet.
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| Not Actual Output from Computer |
Another project I had was converting the ration balancing
program from running on a terminal to running on a smaller system. The original plan was to convert to a small Unix
system, in fact another person and myself went to Unix training. For whatever reason that I cannot remember
now I ended up converting it to run on a personal computer. The program was written in COBOL and I
transferred it to a pc-based COBOL language with no understanding of how the
program really worked. Amazingly it ran
faster on a pc even back over 20 years ago.
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| Ration Balancing Program Ran on CRT |
There was another picture of the computer room in the
brochure which I worked in also as an operator, never really liked that part of
the job. In the picture there is a punch
card reader that was used for doing a certain type of correction but was later
phased out. To the left were the big
removable disk packs that were used for some storage and in the background you
can see the big tape drives. Computers sure have come a long ways.
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| Computer Room |
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| Agri Lab Test |
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