Alfons Ahlnäs cont.
Another problem was the heat generated. The machine was placed in a rather small cellar room without windows and when running the temperature rose resulting in failures. It took some time before the cause of these failures was tracked and then the tops of the cabinets were removed and replaced by a simple hood built of strips of wood and plastic cloth to suck out the heat.A further cause of problems was the card reader which required that the cards were stored in a room with stable temperature and air moist. As many times the cards were brought to the computer room from outside prior to the computation this could not be guaranteed resulting in read errors. Also in this case it was not trivial to find out which caused the error. I then asked IBM if they could serve our reader but as they perceived us as a potential competitor their conditions for this was the impossible to restore the reader in its original state. Despite inferior experience to IBM we rather well succeeded in overcoming the problems with the current and moist. Compared to paper tape, that was produced with a punching machine accumulating a control sum which then at the end was punched giving the possibility to check correct reading, no such checks were available for cards.
Because very little help was given in the programming the users had problems in obtaining correct programs. Because it was known that the computer could fail it happened that the user complained that the computer had failed when actually the program contained bugs.