Big Data -- the 1970s version
It's the late 1970s, and this pilot fish with a brand-new liberal-arts degree gets a data processing job with his state's Motor Vehicles department -- where the tech is a little out of date.
"By 1890, Herman Hollerith was supplying punch card systems, with data on cards that could be read, sorted or summarized by machinery," says fish. "Punch card tub files -- long trays to hold thousands of cards -- were in wide use in the mid-1950s when IBM developed rotating magnetic disks to replace tub files.
"But this Motor Vehicles office never went to punch cards. Licenses and titles were entered by hand on multipart carbon-backed forms. All these flimsy slips of paper were filed in the tub file room in the bowels of a state capitol annex."