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Mr Paradock: A comptometer then. What does it matter? Tell me to do something. Go on. Feed me some data.

From the play One Way Pendulum by N F Simpson (1959)

You will know that the earliest Computers were not machines but people. For a while I was one of those human computers. Working for the London Brick Company I was paid 16s an hour, good money in those days. 

What did I do? Computed of course. There were scores of us in a big room, performing various tasks, but mine was drawing up a weekly report on brick sales. It went something like this.

People brought me records of how many bricks of different varieties (such as Flettons or Wirecuts) had been supplied from a particular factory (such as Stewartby). I merged all these into a big spreadsheet and then worked out the totals. Manually, note; we weren't given mechanical adding machines and pocket calculators didn't exist yet.

We used different coloured inks to distinguish different sorts of brick and pens with very small nibs so we could write very small figures.

Millions of brick were involved but the numbers had to balance, to the exact brick, and to check our working we divided all the numbers in a row or column by 13 using mental arithmetic, added up all the remainders, and checked that the sum agreed with the remainder on dividing the row or column total by 13.

Already it was obvious that the skills this work required would soon be obsolete. In the middle of the office was a small row of Comptometers, like that below, that only specially trained staff could use.

They were the latest thing but then in the twinkling of a silicon chip they too were out of date.

• N F Simpson belonged the movement known as the Theatre of the Absurd. The play concerns the eccentric Mr Groomkirby who wants to build a replica of the Old Bailey in his living room. The Comptometer is introduced in Act II.