Remembering a Different Era

From slide rules to Super Star Trek–one actuary’s early technology journey

David Karo November 2025

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Photo: Shutterstock

You’re probably not a recent ASA (or FSA, for that matter), if you remember using any of these:

1. Slide rules
2. Punch cards
3. Reverse Polish Notation (RPN)
4. 8-inch floppies
5. Your company’s actuarial library (full of SOA Commutation Table books, no doubt)

Having been retired for a while now, I am starting to reach many life milestones. I was recently invited to my 50th high school reunion, the class of 1975. This got me thinking about how much technology has changed since then. Having a science and mathematics background, I have always been an avid user of the latest technology. With that in mind, I am going to reflect on some of the changes I experienced through school and my early actuarial career.

High school and the dawn of pocket calculators

My introduction to the technology revolution began in my junior year high school physics class. We started the year doing our calculations by hand or using slide rules. Midway through the year, our physics lab was given four state-of-the-art Hewlett-Packard 45 pocket calculators. Since each one cost $395 (almost $2,600 in 2025 dollars), they were bolted to a table in the physics lab that only the teacher could unlock. These early model pocket calculators used Reverse Polish Notation to enter data rather than algebraic entry, which is the standard today. I eventually persuaded my parents to buy me the much cheaper Texas Instruments SR-50 for $169.99. It had comparable features but used algebraic entry. Today, you could buy similar calculators for around $10.

By the time I got to college in 1975, pocket calculators had become standard equipment for students. However, I still remember seeing a six-foot-long teaching slide rule hanging on the wall of one of the older science labs, gathering dust. About 15 years ago, I saw one just like it for sale on eBay. Although it was very tempting, I passed on it after considering my non-actuarial spouse’s potential reaction.

College: Punch cards and class registration chaos

In the late 1970s, there was still no concept of personal computers. Taking a computer science class meant going to the computer lab and building your FORTRAN program on a stack of punch cards. Dropping your deck of cards could result in spending hours getting them back in the proper sequence. Savvy students knew that the fix for this was to use a wide-tip marker to draw a diagonal line down the edge of your deck for easy resequencing. Since the number of keypunch machines was limited, most programming was done late at night when the area was less crowded and machines were more readily available. Going late at night also helped with turnaround time.

There were no debuggers then, so coding was a very iterative process, and every error added significant time to a project.

Registration for classes was also decidedly low-tech. Students were assigned times to go to the school’s gymnasium, with priority given to upper classes. Thousands of students would then crowd the room, fighting their way from table to table to collect a punch card for each class session they wanted to register for. This was a lengthy, stressful and physically exhausting process.

Becoming an actuary: A leap into the unknown

When I graduated from college in 1979, the United States was in a severe recession, and the job market was difficult. My job search involved reading the “Help Wanted” ads in the newspaper’s classified section and attending job fairs at college. I saw that insurance companies were well represented and that something called an actuary seemed to fit my background. I soon discovered the Society of Actuaries (SOA) and actuarial exams. After making several long-distance phone calls from the lone pay phone in the dormitory hallway, I was able to find out how to register for Part 1. I duly sent in my $20 check and registered by the only option available:  snail mail.

I had the vague notion that the exam only covered calculus. Not having the Internet to look at a syllabus—or even being aware that one was available—put me at a disadvantage. I had tested out of calculus in college, so I hadn’t studied it since my senior year of high school. Fortunately, I still had my high school calculus book, which I diligently studied as best as possible while battling senioritis. The big day arrived, and I had no idea what to expect other than that the exam would be multiple choice. Calculators were not allowed back then, not that it would have mattered. My heart sank when I opened the exam book and saw that the first seven questions were not on calculus at all. I later found out that the exam also covered linear algebra, which was a subject I had never seen before. Thankfully, the remaining questions looked familiar, and I finished on a better note than I had started.

After graduating from college, I secured my first job utilizing actuarial skills at a small, family-owned insurance company. My continued employment was contingent on having passed Part 1, which I had taken while still in college. In this time before computerized scoring, the wait for exam results was around two months. It seemed like forever! Candidates anxiously waited for a letter in the mail that had their grade and a list of passing candidate numbers. Thankfully, I must have done well enough on the calculus questions to pass despite skipping the linear algebra ones. I got an 8 on the exam and was ready to dive into the actuarial profession at full speed.

Early career: From ledgers to the IBM 5110

The 1980s were an exciting time to work in the insurance field. Technology had become cheaper and within the reach of smaller companies. Previously, only the largest carriers could afford the latest innovations. The actuarial department at my company consisted of a career associate and me. Most of our work was done by hand and on paper. That encompassed everything from filling out the Blue Book for Annual Statements to doing Extended Term and Reduced Paid-Up calculations.

It was invaluable for doing the monthly loss ratio calculations by line of business and region. This was a two- or three-day job that required pulling numbers from raw data and entering thousands of cells of data onto several massive 24-inch ledger pages. Calculating all the cells and the row and column totals was extremely tedious and prone to error. Using today’s technology, this task would take only a few seconds to do after automatically downloading all the data.

Before long, our small department got a computer. It was an IBM 5110, complete with a monochrome 5-inch CRT and a mini-fridge-sized 8-inch external disk drive. The 5110 alone was $9,500. The computer supported the languages BASIC and APL, which we immediately started learning. One of the first significant tasks I recall from those days was entering a 500-line text-based Super Star Trek game on a diskette. I still have that diskette in my personal actuarial archives.

Early computers: In-person support

Perhaps even more amazing was the level of support that IBM provided to a small client like our company. If we had a problem we couldn’t solve, we would go to the local IBM branch office. There, IBM experts would help us resolve our issues. As happened, when we unsuccessfully tried to port floppy disk data from the portable computer to the mainframe. They informed us that the incompatibility was caused by the data in the diskette’s initial data sector. We needed to change a flag byte from hex FB to hex F8 to mark that sector as deleted. This could easily be done using an IBM 3740, which was an already archaic keyboard-to-disk machine. Our IBM rep came to the rescue by connecting us to a meat-packing warehouse that had a 3740 gathering dust in a back room. Every month-end, we would go there to change a single flag byte on that month’s data disk. Eventually, they told us to just take the 3740 with us since they no longer needed it.

Commutation functions and a secret book

As we grew more comfortable with APL and BASIC in the 80s, we began the arduous process of converting our hand calculations to computer-driven ones.

Even our small company had a collection of scores of SOA commutation function books covering the American Experience, 1941 and 1958 mortality tables across multiple interest rates (at half-percent increments), as well as the CSO and CET basis. Getting commutation functions programmed became a high-priority task. This seemed like a doable task. After all, we had, our trusty copy of the SOA publication Life Contingencies by C.W. Jordan as a reference.

Our initial optimism was quickly quashed when we saw a noticeable drift in our values. Since we were still in the tech/computer “dark ages,” our research options were limited. After several frantic calls to colleagues at larger companies, we discovered the existence of a slim SOA volume from 1961 titled Specifications for Mortality Tables Based on 1958 CSO and CET Mortality Tables. This was essentially a manual describing the rounding rules used to produce the published values. We quickly ordered a copy from the SOA. With it in hand, our programming produced accurate results for all the commutation functions we needed.

Workplace perks and oddities of the ’80s

Another benefit of being gainfully employed in the 1980s was having a phone on your desk connected to the company’s Wide Area Telephone Service (WATS) line. A WATS line was a precursor to 800 numbers and allowed long-distance calls at a low flat rate. This service is long defunct, of course. Back then, long-distance calls were very expensive, and people often waited to make their long-distance calls after 11 p.m. when the rates were lower. Having access to a WATS line allowed me to stay in contact with college friends who had moved away. What I didn’t realize was that the company tracked the calls by extension and would give us an itemized bill for personal calls every so often. While it was annoying to be billed for personal calls, the rate was pennies a minute compared to 25 to 50 cents a minute on my home landline. For anyone who grew up with unlimited cell phone minutes, this is almost incomprehensible.

Here are a few reminders of how much workplace technology has changed over the years:

1. Back in the day every company had a keypunch department that oversaw all the data entry to produce punch cards for the mainframe. It seemed like they were always crammed into a small room in some distant corner of the office.
2. In the 1980s, the company had an entire room full of phone books. I vividly remember a room with hundreds of phone books for every area code in the country. This was a lifesaver if one needed to look up the number for a state insurance department that one hadn’t worked with before.
3. Finally, who can forget the bookshelves full of SOA publications one started to accumulate after becoming an associate? Every few months, a box would arrive full of thick volumes of the SOA Recordor the Transactions of the Society of Actuaries. The Record was published quarterly and contained transcripts of all the papers presented at SOA meetings. The Transactions were published annually and included discussions and research on actuarial science and life insurance. It was a primary source for mortality experience studies. Although they collectively took up a lot of shelf space, both publications were important sources of continuing education before the Internet.

The technology revolution

The changes in technology throughout the decades, leading to the increased use of computers, helped transform actuarial work. Companies were able to react more quickly to changes in the market and financial landscape. Before widespread access to computers, insurance contracts changed infrequently due to the amount of work required to develop and administer a new contract type. Hand in hand with the computing advances were advances in word processing. Early in my career, we had a staff of typists who were responsible for typing up our actuarial memos and state filings. This was often a tedious and iterative process. Many actuarial symbols had to be added manually to the documents. A typo could sometimes result in a whole page having to be redone, since there was no internal storage of the document.

Around 1985, WordPerfect was the first word processing program I ever got to use. It was a challenge; there was no graphical user interface, so all formatting was entered as text tags. The best analogy is that it was like writing and formatting a document using HTML. Years later, when we got MS Word, it was a big step up. Even better for actuaries was having access to the Microsoft Equation Editor add-in. That helped us immeasurably because we could then type formulas directly into state filings. I think the happiest people when that happened were our administrative assistants, because they no longer had to wrestle with documents containing formulas full of Greek letters and mathematical symbols.

Conclusion: The foundation for today

These anecdotes are just a snapshot of the first phase of my journey as a technology user. All of them came before such common technologies as fax machines, email, personal computers, laptops and cell phones. As primitive as these early technologies seem today, the technological changes of the 1970s and 1980s laid the foundation for modern insurance company operations.

If this article resonates with you, I invite you to share (at the email linked in my bio, below) your stories of how you did your work using the tech of the day.

Statements of fact and opinions expressed herein are those of the individual authors and are not necessarily those of the Society of Actuaries or the respective authors’ employers.

Copyright © 2025 by the Society of Actuaries, Chicago, Illinois.