When I went to work in the Royal Insurance in Liverpool in 1962 they had installed a computer system to the building I worked in.
More than fifty people, mainly young girls, would enter information on punch cards in a large office on the first floor. These would then be taken to the computer room. This was a big room, which was kept at a certain temperature. There were no windows and it had a viewing gallery around it, as we had many visitors, who came to see what we were doing.
The room had a bank of collating machines, which sorted the punch cards and also a lot of printers. Off the main room was an office with some engineers, who serviced the machines and dealt with any problems, which were fairly frequent!
In a separate room there were about 20 programmers, who did the programmes for the machines and who thought of themselves as being a class apart!
I think that there were other machines in the main computer room but at a distance of over fifty years it is difficult to remember.
Anne Martin U3A, June 2020