A plugboard or control panel (the term used depends on the application area) is an array of jacks or sockets (often called hubs) into which patch cords can be inserted to complete an electrical circuit. Control panels are sometimes used to direct the operation of unit record equipment, cipher machines, and early computers.
Unit record equipment
Main article: Unit record equipment
The earliest machines were hardwired for specific applications. Control panels were introduced in 1906 for the Hollerith Type 1 Tabulator (photo of Type 3 with built-in control panel here). Removable control panels were introduced with the Hollerith (IBM) type 3-S tabulator in the 1920s. Applications then could be wired on separate control panels, and inserted into tabulators as needed. Removable control panels came to be used in all unit record machines where the machine's use for different applications required rewiring.
IBM removable control panels ranged in size from 6 1/4" by 10 3/4" (for machines such as the IBM 077, IBM 550, IBM 514) to roughly one to two feet (300 to 600 mm) on a side and had a rectangular array of hubs. Plugs at each end of a single-conductor patch cord were inserted into hubs, making a connection between two contacts on the machine when the control panel was placed in the machine, thereby connecting an emitting hub to an accepting or entry hub. For example, in a card duplicator application a card column reading (emitting) hub might be connected to a punch magnet entry hub. It was a relatively simple matter to copy some fields, perhaps to different columns, and ignore other columns by suitable wiring. Tabulator control panels could require dozens of patch cords for some applications.
Tabulator functions were implemented with both mechanical and electrical components. Control panels simplified the changing of electrical connections for different applications, but changing most tabulator's use still required mechanical changes. The IBM 407 was the first IBM tabulator that did not require such mechanical changes; all the 407's functions were electrically controlled and were completely specified by the application's control panel and carriage tape.
For most machines with control panels, from collators, interpreters, to the IBM 407, IBM manuals describe the control panel as "directing" or "automatic operation was obtained by...". The control panels of calculators, such as the IBM 602 and IBM 604, that specified a sequence of operations, were described as being programs.
Wiring of unit record equipment control panels
Unit record equipment was typically configured for a specific task using a removable control panel. The electrical connections of the various components in the unit record machine were presented on the panel, and connections between them were determined by the wiring, with the actual connections made when the panel was inserted into the machine and locked in place. Perhaps the closest modern analog is the field-programmable gate array, where a fixed number of logic components are made available and their interconnection wiring is determined by the user.
Wiring a unit record control panel required knowledge of the machine's components and their timing constraints. The components of most unit record machines were synchronized to a rotating shaft. One rotation represented a single machine cycle, during which punched cards would advance from one station to the next, a line might be printed, a total might be printed and so on. The cycles were divided into points according to when the rows on a punched card would appear under a read or punch station. On most machines, cards were fed face down, 9-edge (bottom edge) first. Thus the first point in a card cycle would 9-time, the second 8 time and so on to 0-time. The times from 9 to 0 were known as digits. These would be followed by 11 time and 12 time, also known as zones.