Modern Mechanix

https://archive.org/stream/irshistoricalfac00unit/irshistoricalfac00unit_djvu.txt a bit broken up but it says clearly:

> January 1962 Automated data processing was officially put into operation in the IRS.

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/62dbfullar.pdf says

> --Dn September 19, 1961, less than a year following its establishment as a separate division, the Automatic Data Processing Division...

So the division was likely established in 1960. This https://books.google.ca/books?id=x1YESXanrgQC&pg=PA119&lpg=PA119&dq=Martinsburg+irs+mainframe&source=bl&ots=ZJ_Ald8sY2&sig=JnDB_-3VboxS0sLF3v0GQub_xKs&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiS1p7V7-PaAhUM2GMKHfveAHc4ChDoAQg0MAQ#v=onepage&q=Martinsburg%20irs%20mainframe&f=false history corroborates by saying the treasury authorized the IRS to computerize fully in 1959.

They were 7074, we know that from http://blog.modernmechanix.com/big-brother-7074-is-watching-you/ Popular Science but also that some docs from 2016 says https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/scap-pia.pdf

> SCAP downloads Corporate Files On-Line (CFOL) data from the IBM mainframe at the Enterprise Computing Center, Martinsburg. The CFOL data resides in a variety of formats
(packed decimal, 7074, DB2, etc.).

> That might be some of the oldest running code in the world.

https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/dpd50/dpd50_chronology2.html says The IBM 9090 SABRE airline reservation system begins to be installed by American Airlines in 1961. That makes SABRE contemporaneous with the…

> What a bizarrely great site.

I was organizing a ton of old saved files (including saved webpages) from many years back (some over a decade old). One of the pages I had saved was "X-Ray Solves Secret of Life (Jun, 1939)" : http://blog.modernmechanix.com/x-ray-solves-secret-of-life/ (interesting read on what can happen with emerging tech).

I checked to see if the site still existed (lots of my old saved files point to dead domains or interestingly, domains that have been repurposed for completely different businesses unrelated to their original content). As I crawled around the site, my impressions were exactly like yours. Treasure trove of interesting historical info!

I came across the ASCII article and decided to post. I love ASCII art but also wanted to point HN users to the site.

> luck of the draw that they chose a free maintenance-less platform

I was curious about this too. Just checked and it's running Wordpress 5.2 (released 07may2019). Some of the other backend tech is a little dated...

side note: Years ago, I was always curious if I should have been saving webpages as MHT or MAFF files. Now that both of these containers are dead, it turned out that Mozilla's MAFF was the better solution. It's just a compressed format, easy to unzip and all the pages were as viewable as the originals. For MHT files, I needed Pale Moon running with an MHT extension (used this to resave pages as "html complete").

Western Union tried something similar in 1952, called "Telecar". They had fax machines in small trucks, which would drive around and deliver telegrams.

This was an extension of Western Union's DeskFax service. Western Union offered this from the 1940s to the 1960s. They had a little desktop machine which could both scan and print on small pieces of paper. But it transmitted only to a Western Union office, where the message was manually retyped and sent through Western Union's Teletype-based message switching system.[2] At the receiving end, the Teletype output might be scanned and delivered to the end user's DeskFax.

Some people still have and restore these machines. The end-user machines won't talk peer to peer without a conversion unit in the middle, but it's not that hard to build one.

(How Western Union blew it as a business is an sad story. They were a nationwide digital communications company long before anybody else. But their management was very attached to their structure of vast numbers of retail offices and message delivery at a high price point.

Today's Western Union is just a name, bought by First Data for their money transfer service.)

[1] http://blog.modernmechanix.com/telecar/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAJQVStZYDk

Hardly an innovation. Various people already had the same idea so many times. It seems quite an obvious and tempting thing to do.

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2008/12/18/train-picks-up-and-drops-passengers-without-stopping/

Well. It's pretty much unworkable. Train is not a single rigid body, it's composed from bogies and car bodies, and they are only quite loosely attached. They absolutely have to be. So you can't expect it to just sit as a rock on the tracks, even in pretty low speeds. And with speed low enough, you are maybe better to simply stop. Modern electric bullet train unit with high powered axles ratio can accelerate really, really fast.

Anyway, you could spend money much better on allowing higher speeds on the whole track, or improving adjacent tracks so to allow higher speeds even for feeders and conventional trains, which could allow you to make fewer stops.

I am sorry that this comment was pulled down. I posted in earnest because the subject is interesting to me. I would like to ask why to suggest that a personal id number controlled by the person and not by the corporate owners of the id database is a bad comment? In fact, this article just posted to HN a few hours ago http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2008/06/05/the-computer-data-bank-will-it-kill-your-freedom suggests that in the US, the social security number become a unique identifier in "data banks" starting in the 60s. So, to me it appears that it is legitimate to discuss if the social security number, email or a new personal id number owned by the person ought to be chosen as the new id standard for the modern post-internet human individual. Please correct, if I don't understand the issue here. Thanks.

I first recall reading about Don Valentine in the October 1982 issue of National Geographic on Silicon Valley.

An excellent snapshot of Silicon Valley and a glimpse of Don Valentine’s role in it.

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/high-tech-high-risk-and-high-life-in-silicon-valley/

Risk/Venture Capital, despite valid criticisms of it, has had an outsized effect on our world in the last 50+ years.

And Don Valentine played an outsized role in it.