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I found out from my father recently that he actually set up the first computer network at the Department of Energy - something he still does. His job was actually radiation monitoring, which meant driving around and deploying monitors all around Northern New Mexico and then writing down what they reported on Nixie tubes. The way he told me, he realized that the Nixie tubes were reporting "data" it just needed a better way of logging than "write down the number" so he created interfaces that would record the values.
He then fed this stuff into a National Semiconductor Starplex Development System: http://www.1000bit.it/scheda.asp?id=1985 ...which allowed the data to be uploaded to the mainframes: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ato9n/how_many_... After that, he was given the budget to buy a printer.