The Land Before Binary

In the early days of computing, 1 + 1 didn’t always equal 10

In the summer of 2016, USDS assigned me to the IRS to work on a project called Online Accounts. When on assignment I tend to wander, because helping out big complex software projects rarely involves simple straight forward advice or solutions. You have to figure that before you showed up the agency has probably been through many rounds of expensive consultants, working groups, maybe even a few research and development centers. If getting things on the right track was a matter of saying “go to the cloud”, someone else would have charged the government at least $350K to hear them say it.

Fortunately, bureaucracies are slow so there is always plenty of time to explore what else is going on around a project and from that garner insight into why the problems directly relevant to your mission have become so intractable … and hopefully learn to solve them.

The IRS has a lot of mainframes. And as millions of Americans recently found out, many of them are quite old. So as I wandered about meeting different types of engineers and chatting about their day-to-day blockers I started to learn much more about how these machines worked. It was a fascinating rabbit hole that exposed me to things like “decimal machines” and “2 out of 5 code”. It revealed something to me that I had not ever considered:

Computers did not always use binary code.

Computers did not always use base 2. Computers did not always operate on just an…