plugboard
[′pləg‚bȯrd] (computer science)
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E, Copyright © 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
plugboard
A board containing a matrix of sockets used to program a machine. Plugboards were widely used in punch card tabulating machines and early computers and were the predecessor to software programming. For example, each wire in the board directs a column of data from the punch card to a destination which could be a print column or a blank column in a card to be punched. A wire could also function as a switch by closing a circuit. See punch card and accounting machine. |
| Mounds of Spaghetti |
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| This plugboard directed a card punch machine to read the cards in one hopper and punch holes in a blank cards in another hopper. Fields could be rearranged, and minor calculations could be performed. (Image courtesy of The Computer History Museum, www.computerhistory.org) |
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| The Author of This Encyclopedia |
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| In 1962, Alan Freedman was a Tabulating Technician; a fancy title for a punch card programmer. Proud to be photographed because it looks like "his" office at the Pennsylvania Sales Tax Bureau; however, he was really at one end of a 40-foot room. |
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| Love that Pose |
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| Twenty years later, Freedman finally did have his own office two blocks from New York's Penn Station. |
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