Improvement Insights Blog
Programming Used to Be Hard Wired
Computer programming used to be done on hardware boards with wires. Now it’s much easier. Six Sigma used to be hard. Now it’s easy too. Here’s why:
“Well hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].
“When I was a kid, my dad was the manager of a company and they had to program their own computers. He had a hard board and you plugged wires in it to get it to do things like add, subtract, multiply, divide, calculate taxes on sales of stuff. It was old IBM 401 or so… I don’t know what it was, but you would then slide that into the computer, snap it in and then run your reports. Boy, that was hard!
“Eventually they came up with all kinds of computer programming language, from Fortran to COBOL to PL/1 to C language, C++ language and now it’s Python and all these other languages. Most of QI Macros is written in Visual Basic for Applications.
“One of the things is technology is always advancing, and things that used to be complicated are now easy, right? Super easy. That’s what I’m trying to do in QI Macros. Make it super easy for people to do Lean Six Sigma stuff: to get a control chart, to automate SPC, to do all those things… Fishbones, all that stuff. How do we make that so that it’s just super simple, so that we don’t have to [be] plugging things into boards or [using] hand calculators. You know, when I started they had layouts for control charts and you had to calculate everything and plot all the stuff… oh my gosh! You don’t have to do that anymore. This is so easy. Might as well get on board.
“That’s my Improvement Insight. Let’s go out and improve something this week: maybe the tools you use for Quality Improvement.”
