I am a little older now having made a career in the insurance industry beginning in 1970 and I have always been fascinated by computer innovation. When I came into the insurance industry it was weaning its way from manual systems and large staffs. The impact over 51 years has been evident to see. Just one aspect of it follows.
My introduction to the computer was with the IBM card with its 80 columns. Data entry meant gathering information from a manual form to another piece of paper typically called a coding sheet. Armies of key punch operators would punch holes into specified fields of the 80 column IBM cards based on the data on the coding sheets. Of course there would be manual checks along the way to insure the IBM cards matched the coding sheets.
Once you had your IBM cards made you could sort your cards with collating machines and card sorters if you wanted to verify or tabulate them. Your intention though was to feed the cards into a card reader attached to your computer. This computer was likely an IBM 360 big iron machine. Also attached would be large mounted tapes containing an existing master file and a blank tape to be created as your new master file. We called this batch processing and likely done on a weekly basis. From the new Master File you could run various reports to be distributed to users.
Eventually, the big iron would upgrade from tape storage to 8” floppy disks and very large physical hard drives. While this was happening someone thought wouldn’t be great if we could save some steps and eliminate paper and key punchers. Why not put in some bulky green CRT monitors for the users. Attach a keyboard and the user could call up a template form and directly input data. This new procedure would drive any auditor insane with the perceived lack of controls.
Even into the 80s or 90s as I traveled the country to visit insurance companies their executives would take me past their computer operations. Behind sterile glass walls on raised floors for all to see would be computers buzzing away tended to by the high priests known as computer operators. And the really special priests were called computer programmers who came up with all the programs that kept account of insurance policies and got the premium bills out on time and claims paid.
Of course during this time PCs were started to appear on desktops. Clerks who once had bulky mechanical adding machines were threatening the whole office structure with a PC on their desk instead. Secretaries who once took short hand to produce letters were now seeing their bosses typing their own correspondence with that new PC.
I visited one company that had a reactionary chief actuary who was not going let his actuarial staff ever possess a PC. A Monroe calculator would work just fine. His actuaries were at the mercy of the IT department for all their computational needs and no mere mortal with a PC was ever going to use Lotus 1-2-3 or Microsoft Multi-Plan (before Excel) to compute insurance reserves.
The PC upended structures of entire companies and industries. Fast forward to today and a pocket sized device is upending the structures that were founded in the 1980s and 1990s. I am sure other Kossacks have had similar experiences along the way.
