United’s IBM 305 RAMAC was the first one he ever touched. It was huge, specifically designed to manage colossal databases like the fifty-two weeks’ worth of reservations and seating records consigned to Denver’s safekeeping. But what really struck Kay was the primitiveness of its operational routine. The system was serviced by platoons of attendants, full-time menials doing nothing more refined than taking stacks of punch cards from one machine and loading them in the next. To his amazement, digital electronics turned out to be as mindless and labor-intensive as laying a sewer line.
