To Save Paper, Mainframe Tech Ruined a Week of Work
The Register, Monday, October 12th, 2026
Who, Me?: a Sperry Univac operator cancelled the wrong print job and wiped out a week-long inventory run as US bosses watched.
In The Register's Who, Me? column, a reader recalls working at Sperry Univac's UK office in the era of punch cards, tapes and disk platters, when program output went straight to printers.
A weekly inventory job took five or six days to run and print, and three managers had flown in from the US to watch it.
When a smaller job started generating far too many pages, he got the programmer's OK to cancel its print stage but stopped the printer running the inventory job instead.
All the output, even the summary pages, was lost, and the visitors had to wait another week.