The Social Security System

“I remember the day that Arthur Altmeyer, who was then First Assistant Secretary of Labor, walked into my office and said, ‘You know I think we found it.’ Because he had been talking about, you know, handwritten pieces of records and how they were to be organized and stacked up, ‘I think we’ve found it. These new IBM machines, I believe they can do it.’ And so out of that really inventive group, that worked in the IBM research group, we found a way by which this could be done.”

“One can recall with amusement some of the very crude methods that we had no choice but to use when we first started. But humorous as these methods seem today, the most noteworthy fact is that there was never any feeling of satisfaction with methods as they were but instead a strong—almost a fierce—determination to improve them just as quickly as it was possible.”

“The tabulating equipment in those days was extremely simple. And they were like large typewriters. You’d put cards in and then they would print. They would list the items. They would also list amounts if you wanted. And they had the capability of producing a total, so that the tabulator was a combination of an adding machine and a typewriter. And it was very slow. But before our people got through with that simple piece of equipment, it was a highly sophisticated tabulator for one job.”

“I can’t over-stress the fact that Social Security was, if not the only certainly the best, organization for IBM to work with to do this kind of innovative development.”

“We couldn’t have done a decent job with Social Security unless we had the [IBM 077] Collator.”

“It was from that date, in 1936, that IBM’s importance as a business systems operator, and being the largest one, took off.”

“The Social Security agency punched cards from records sent in by employers all over the country. There were millions and millions of them, and if we hadn’t had some way of putting them together we would have been lost; we just couldn’t have done it.”

“In 1949, as I mentioned at one point earlier, I was on a detail to the Bureau of Employees Compensation and I told the head of the Accounting Section—they were paying claims to Government employees—I suggested that she might want to put in an IBM system instead of a hand-posting system of the monthly payments. They were posting every monthly payment by hand every month to everybody who was getting their compensation! I suggested they may want to put it on some kind of an IBM thing. And she told me, ‘Look, I’ve been here since 1917 and that’s the way we did it and that’s the way we’re going to do it until I die.’ I don’t think I’ve ever worked in an organization where anybody said that to me or even thought that to me, not in Social Security.”