Think Black

by Clyde W. Ford

  Early in the life of punch card technology, many sizes and formats existed. Hollerith, a shrewd inventor, engineered his machines so they were compatible only with the cards made by his company, the Tabulating Machine Company, which later became part of IBM. For the 1890 census, Hollerith’s punch cards had twenty-two columns with eight punch positions in each column. By 1928, IBM had settled on an eighty-column, twelve-row card that remained in use well into the twenty-first century.

  As a storage device, an eighty-column, twelve-row punch card is capable of storing 80 times 12 binary digits of information, or 960 bits (bit is shorthand for binary digit). Modern-day computer storage is measured in bytes, and there are usually 8 bits to a byte. So, an eighty-column, twelve-row punch card can store 120 bytes of information. Put into perspective, it would take roughly 80 million punch cards to store as much information as a typical 8-gigabyte smartphone stores today. That’s a stack of cards eight miles high. Set end to end, the cards would span the distance between Los Angeles, California, and Cape Town, South Africa.

  Punch card equipment (sorters, tabulators, printers, etc.) can process twenty-five thousand cards per hour, which equates to roughly six cards per second, or 6 kilobits per second. A solid-state drive (SSD) on a modern laptop computer can process data at rates of up to 6 gigabits per second, which is about 1 million times faster.

  Punch card equipment, also known as unit record equipment (URE), was in use throughout the later part of the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth century, prior to the advent of electronic computers. The IBM 407 is a prime example of a transitional machine with aspects of both the older electromechanical digital technology and the newer electronic digital technology. My father needed to learn both technologies, and when I went to work for IBM, so did I.

  Astute businessmen do not necessarily arise from brilliant engineers, and Herman Hollerith embodied that notion. Obstreperous, pugnacious, and litigious, Hollerith lost his Tabulating Machine Company’s main client, the US Census Bureau, in 1905, owing to his intransigence. Infuriated and paranoid now that he’d been displaced by a competitor, Hollerith sued for the right to automate the 1910 census. Ultimately, he took the US government to court in an attempt to stop the census from taking place unless his machines did the counting. Needless to say, he lost.

  In 1911, Charles Flint, an arms merchant who’d amassed a fortune selling weapons to all sides of brutish nineteenth-century wars, saw an opportunity to buy not only Hollerith’s faltering company but three other seemingly unrelated concerns: International Time Recording Company, which manufactured time clocks for recording workers’ hours; Computing Scale Company, which produced retail weighing scales; and Bundy Manufacturing, which produced key-actuated time clocks and also owned prime real estate in Endicott, New York. Flint rolled these diverse businesses into the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, otherwise known as CTR. Though Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine Company was the largest of the four, Flint refused to allow Hollerith to run the firm. Instead, he turned to one of America’s rising corporate rogues, and a once-indicted felon, Thomas J. Watson. With a reputation for ruthlessly crushing rivals and stealing their business, Watson became CEO of CTR in 1924, and he changed the company’s name to IBM, short for International Business Machines.

  As Watson swelled to power in these early years of the twentieth century, a Black Tide swelled north. Fleeing the racism and brutality of the Jim Crow South, millions of Black Americans joined this Great Migration, seeking relative freedom and greater opportunity in cities like New York. A “new civilization of sidewalks, churches, and the most beautiful country ever”3—that’s how the Williamsbridge neighborhood of the Bronx was advertised at the turn of the twentieth century, attracting many southern migrants, like my grandfather John Baptist Ford, to the farms and the pastoral setting this area afforded well into the mid-twentieth century. My grandfather purchased a home at 760 East 221st Street, where my father grew up and where I spent the first ten years of my life.

  Trinity Baptist Church, on East 224th Street, served the growing number of upwardly striving Black families in Williamsbridge. Our family belonged to the church, as had my father’s family. In part, my father insisted that his children go to Trinity Baptist Church because his father had insisted on his own Christian upbringing. Working as a porter, my grandfather slept on his train car and had but four hours a day to spend with his family—and most of those hours, his three children were at school. Still, on Sundays, my grandfather visited church twice. “I go to church from eleven to twelve Sunday morning and take my children to Sunday school from one to two in the afternoon,” he told Collier’s Weekly in 1924. “If I knew there wasn’t any heaven or hell, I’d still say that the Christian religion was the best thing for us all to follow.”4 My grandfather’s funeral was held at Trinity Baptist Church.

  As a child, I found Trinity Baptist Church, with its open baptismal pit sitting just behind the altar, terrifying. The preacher laid a board across the pit, upon which he stood to deliver fiery sermons. And when the preacher wasn’t preaching, the Women’s Auxiliary took over to raise money for new construction, scholarships, and the Bible camp and to serve as a liaison between the church and the Williamsbridge community. The auxiliary was an outgrowth of the Community Circle, begun by women in the early days of the church.

  I’d just turned five when my reputation as a lost member of Trinity’s flock took flight. My Sunday school teacher rapped twice on her desk and asked the class what the knocking meant. She was, of course, fishing for Luke 11:9 or perhaps Matthew 7:7: “Knock and it shall be opened unto you.”

  But instead, I shot my hand into the air and blurted out, “Knock, knock for Knickerbocker Beer!” Knickerbocker Beer, a popular brand in New York City at the time, featured television commercials with a hand knocking on wood.

  Word of my transgression spread quickly. Unsure whether to spank me or to burst out laughing, my father fretted over my faith. He vowed to read the Bible with me more often, to correct my waywardness. For a time, our family gathered in our upstairs living room to kneel in front of our couch. With eyes closed, we recited together the Psalm of David, “The Lord Is My Shepherd.”

  Throughout his life, my father professed being a devout Christian, though I could never reconcile his love and understanding of science and technology with his love and understanding of an anthropomorphic God. I often thought that maybe his religious devotion was a way he sought to hedge his bets.

  Williamsbridge, and community bulwarks like Trinity Baptist Church, never failed to show pride in their prominent Black sons and daughters. When I was a child, my father constantly introduced men and women to me by saying, “He’s the first to work for a prestigious law firm” or “She’s the first to graduate from this college” or “He’s the first to be promoted to captain in the New York City Fire Department.” Thomas J. Watson’s job offer catapulted my father into these lofty ranks, where failure was simply out of the question.

  * * *

  Finally in possession of instructions that matched his punch cards, my father was not in possession of time. With his project due soon, my father turned to Trinity Baptist Church for help. I don’t believe it was for spiritual guidance when what he really needed was his 407 control boards programmed and ready to work. I believe he may have asked for assistance from the Women’s Auxiliary. If he did, it would have been a masterful stroke of genius, or the trenchant insights of a chess master bent on winning with whatever pieces remained. Over many years, I witnessed him as both that genius and that chess master.

  Imagine twenty older Black women gathered in the basement of a small but proud neighborhood Baptist church, the pastor among them. Beneath the gaze of a painted crucifixion, my father had placed one model 407 control board on each of two long fold-up tables that normally held fried chicken and potato salad. He’d stripped each board clean, and arranged several baskets of patch cords nearby. Diagrams of the control boards with his penciled-in connections al
so rested on the tables. He raised his arms to ask for quiet.

  Then he let the women know that in a short period of time he must teach them how to program an IBM 407 from the control boards and patch cords sitting in front of them, and from the diagrams of those boards and the instructions he’d written out. He began to describe how to read an instruction and make a connection between two sockets, when an older woman named Gladys raised her hand but did not wait, and interrupted my father with a high-pitched, staccato burst of her voice.

  To my father’s surprise, she described perfectly how to find one socket, take one end of a patch cord and plug it in there, then find another socket and plug the other end there. She then volunteered that she had been a switchboard operator during the war, who used patch cords and control boards for years. When my father asked if anyone else had worked as a switchboard operator, several women raised their hands. They all received instant promotions to supervisors of the other women’s work, and Gladys got promoted to be the supervisor of the supervisors.

  Eight women worked to a control board. Four primary programmers, four looking over their shoulders. Supervisors walked around checking and rechecking everyone’s work. Those not at the boards helped by serving food and drinks to those who were.

  As the Trinity Baptist Women’s Auxiliary sprang into action, hummed spirituals floated through the air. Women reading diagrams called out control board socket names and patch cord colors. Others pushed and pulled patch cords into sockets. Supervisors hovered over tables, examining the diagrams, then running their fingers the length of every patch cord. The pastor passed out lemonade and crackers.

  Some women cried out that programming these machines was just like playing Bingo with two cards, only instead of Bs and Is and Ns and Gs and Os across the top and numbers under each column the row and column combinations now had highfalutin names. Others exclaimed it reminded them of pattern-knitting or basket weaving.

  Gladys hushed them, with a reminder that one of Trinity’s own needed their help, and there was no room for error. Meanwhile, my father worked on a third control board as the women bantered and the soft humming of spirituals continued. He watched the clock count-off time but he also watched his work getting done. When the last woman stood up from the table, Gladys examined her work and nodded.

  * * *

  IBM final examinations sometimes drew in not only students and instructors but also managers and their managers and even clerical staff, especially if a person of special interest was slated to present. As an IBM systems engineering student, I somehow had a talent for technical sales presentations, and more than once my final examinations boasted standing room only for many in the education department, most with little connection to me, who wanted to see the twenty-year-old Black kid with the huge Afro convincingly pitch a million-dollar-a-month computer system to a hypothetical customer. Thankfully, I never faced anything close to the pressure my father did as Watson’s hand-chosen hire and the first Black systems engineer to complete a 407 class.

  I don’t know if Peter Hauptmann ran his classes the way my IBM instructors ran theirs. But if he did, he would have had the other teams present their final examinations before my father presented his. My presentations were often the highlight of the final day of class, and my instructors took pleasure in saving what they perceived as the best for last. Hauptmann may not have known what to expect from my father, and this too may have been a reason for letting him wait until the end.

  Did race play a factor in these IBM final exams? I always felt it did. People packed my presentations, in part, because they had never seen a young Black kid sell the benefits of IBM’s latest technology. I feel it also did for my father, simply because no one had ever seen a Black systems engineer take an IBM final exam.

  Pitching the benefits of technology is much easier than presenting a program that performs correctly. There’s leeway with a pitch created from a script then delivered to captivate, capture, and convince. Not so with presenting programs, which either work or don’t. When you attempt to control the actions of a computer with the written instructions of a human, unforeseen consequences are frequently the result. I know. I’ve pitched technology and presented programs in front of IBM classes.

  It’s an excruciating experience to watch others present their programs before you, while inside you’re questioning: Did I place my instructions in the correct card columns? Was my logic faulty? Did I remember to account for this contingency? Are my punch cards in the right order? Will the machine perform as expected? One small mistake, a missing punctuation mark or a misspelled instruction, and nothing else matters. Your program simply will not work. Before computers checked for such errors, it was left to programmers and systems engineers to produce flawless punch card code. That level of perfection is very stressful. I’ve felt it, as I’m sure my father did in making his final presentation.

  To these questions and doubts swirling around any systems engineer, my father, when his turn came, had the added burden of standing in front of a group of men, many of whom would have gladly watched him fail, some of whom may have already had a hand in engineering his failure by providing him with instructions mismatched for his punch card deck. Furthermore, Watson’s signature is on my father’s report card from his 407 class, and he could have well been sitting in the classroom for my father’s final presentation, watching the performance of the Black systems engineer he’d hired.

  Simply making it through his final examination without a program glitch would have probably sufficed. But my father believed a Black man needed to prove his worth by being twice as good as others. When the correct result is only a set of numbers printed in the proper columns, one team’s output tends to look remarkably similar to another’s. How do you distinguish yourself? How did my father end up completing his 407 class not with acceptable results but with honors? Thinking like a systems engineer, like the man I knew as an exceptional programmer, I have an answer based on my father’s love of pushing the limits of these early computers.

  Long before today’s sophisticated graphics, my father would bring home stacks of eleven-by-fourteen-inch computer paper showing graphics created using the printer’s available character set. For my birthday, I’d get a set of folded pages that, unfolded, read HAPPY BIRTHDAY in large block letters, each letter created from the letter it represents—so the H would be created from Hs and the B created from Bs. Next to that saying there’d be an image of a birthday cake made of Xs and Os and other characters, complete with the right number of candles, and finally, next to the cake, I’d find my name also printed in large block letters.

  For Christmas, my father would unfurl a stack of pages with an image of Santa Claus driving a sled pulled by reindeer, Christmas trees, and the words MERRY CHRISTMAS. In those days, there were no colored printers, so the images were only in black and white. Today, graphics like these are called “ASCII art” (from the American Standard Code for Information Interchange) and can often be found beneath the signature lines of emails, with plenty more examples online.5

  When I came along with computers, as a student in high school and college, we created these graphics for fun and to boast of our prowess programming punch card machines and line printers. My father, and the systems engineers of his day, also created them simply because they could, but in the early days of computers, full-page character graphics served another purpose. They enabled programmers to distinguish the output of their program from the output of another when all outputs were stacked up in a pile of pages on the printer. This use of character graphics would not have been lost on my father as he attempted to distinguish himself from the other systems engineers in his class. I can envision the first page of his printed output with his name, JOHN STANLEY FORD, printed in large block letters, each letter created by the letter it represents, and beneath that his title, SYSTEMS ENGINEER, IBM. Surely, the Old Man would have been pleased. And if Tommy Barnes had popped his head into that room, or had a seat at the back of the class, he w
ould have been pleased as well.

  * * *

  I have only the vaguest recollection of meeting Thomas J. Watson as a child, possibly at an IBM Christmas party in New York City, not long before his death. His name, however, I heard often: Mr. Watson, T. J. Watson, Watson Senior, or simply, the Old Man. By whatever name my father referred to Watson, throughout his life he uttered it with a reverence typically reserved for royalty. Watson loomed as large for my father as he did for other IBM employees. In fact, a cultlike atmosphere surrounded Watson, who did everything to encourage it.

  Of the one hundred songs listed in the company’s official songbook, Songs of the IBM,6 many, like “Ever Onward,” were simply odes to Watson, sung with revival-style fervor by employees at company gatherings:

  There’s a thrill in store for all,

  For what we’re about to toast.

  The corporation known in every land . . .

  Of that “man of men” our friend and guiding hand.

  The name of T. J. Watson means a courage none can stem. . . .7

  “Hail, to the IBM,” the IBM anthem written by the firm’s in-house lyricist, Fred W. Tappe, with music by operatic composer Vittorio Giannini, similarly told of Watson’s glory:

  Our voices swell in admiration,

  Of T. J. Watson proudly sing,

  He’ll ever be our inspiration,

  To him our voices loudly ring . . .

  Hail to his honored name.8

  By accepting a job at IBM, you became part of a family, not a company. Even in my day as an IBM employee, I heard this message often. John Baptist Ford, my father’s father, died just as my father entered IBM. If my father, consciously or unconsciously, sought a surrogate to fill that void, in Watson he’d surely found one. Watson presented himself as the paterfamilias of IBM. He bestowed generous compensation packages, bonuses, vacations, health care, and country club memberships to IBM employees. Few employees questioned Watson’s largesse; even fewer dared whisper that it might be a shrewd tactic to keep a unionized workforce at bay.