To the present day the history of banking software is nearly untold. While there is already some literature on the use of computers in the banking industry, most of it focuses only on the hardware and its restrictions (cf. Cortada 2006). The logic behind these machines remains untold. With the advent of the computer as a universal machine since the 1950s, business processes have been written into code, not hard wired into the machine. Furthermore, not the processor but the system software steered what was presented on the screen to the banking employee. Hardware got more and more exchangeable, while the real guiding principles of computing in action are to be found in software. This article analyzes how German savings banks used software to digitalize their business during the period of the Cold War.

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The study of church history in the Pacific Northwest—that is, in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and British Columbia—would seem, at first glance, to be less rewarding than similar study in another region. The Pacific Northwest has never been the center of great religious excitement, or the place of origin for consequential and sustained doctrinal viewpoints. The region did produce one of the important latter-day Indian cults, the Ghost Dance, or Messiah craze, and the region does harbor “Psychiana,” in Moscow, Idaho. At one time there were religious communistic societies in the area, best known of which is probably the Aurora colony, in Oregon. But by and large, the Pacific Northwest cannot be styled a center of religious originality.