In 1957, I think the month was May, I arrived in Maywood Air Force Station to begin my assignment to the Air Force Ballistics Missiles Logistics Office. A few months later we moved temporarily to Mira Loma Air Force Station, then to Norton Air Force Base, our ultimate location.
The mission of the AFBMLO was to develop and operate a computer system for controlling the supplying of all ICBMs and IRBMs world-wide. The AF BMLO was a part of the Air Materiel Command headquartered at Wright-Patterson AFB. To accomplish the mission the AF acquired a large IBM 705 computer whose main memory could hold 40,000 characters rather than the standard 20,000. The Air Force also gathered together a group of persons — military, IBM representatives, consultants and general service civilian employees — whose assignment it would be to develop and operate this computer controlled supply control system. Of the persons gathered together, only a few of us had any experience developing computer systems: a handful of the consultants from Sutherland Company (Peoria, Illinois), one general services civilian and one second lieutenant, me.
A supply control system — an inventory system — has to have a database. The database would contain the records of the millions of parts available or installed on missiles. We would assume today this database would be stored on a hard drive. In 1957 we did not have hard drives; although we did have magnetic drums (as long as they kept revolving without failing) and we did use them for intermediate storage as best I can remember. Our “database” would be stored on a stack of large, long magnetic tapes; each reel of 7-track tape could store millions of records and several reels were necessary to store the main inventory file. To process the files on tape our computer had 26 separate tape units.
The system contained many different files, each of which resided on one or more reels of magnetic tape. Examples were the massive inventory database, parts description database, location description database, incoming order file, shipping file and on and on. Think about the inventory database residing on several reels of magnetic tape. To get to a particular record on the database all the previous records had to be passed by. To update the database changes were read in from another tape file, matched against the inventory database and a new inventory database was created onto a new set of magnetic tape reels. After an “update” was finished a new set of tapes would be the latest inventory master; the tapes that were read to create the new master would be the last previous master database and so on back as far as history was kept.
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