The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Wage Survey (BLS/OWS) System has a long history of how it grew from manual to nearly automatic processing procedures. The current version of the Survey collection-to-bulletin publication application is written in COBOL and runs as a batch job in the Departmental Computer Center's (DCC) IBM 360-68. Previous versions had made use of 7074's, 1401's, 650's, et al.. During all of these generations, there were many studies such as Task Force group reports on defining functions and their implementation, given the set of hardware capabilities they had to work with. These reports, memos of Regional Office and Washington discussions of realities and hopes, the ad hoc and preemptory user's broadsides, written up in haste for fielding the software, and the technicalities of Wage Survey operation as defined by BLS, made up the inputs that had to be arranged in the, as-yet, undefined structure.
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