> Ford Motor Company was hemorrhaging millions of dollars every month. It was impossible to give an exact number because there was no accounting system. “Can you believe it?” Henry II later remembered. “In one department they figured their costs by weighing the pile of invoices on a scale”
> the corresponding receipt, then pinned them together and sent out a check, usually a few months late. To figure out how much money the company owed, they stacked up all the bills, measured them with a ruler, and through a formula of unknown provenance turned feet into dollars.
From _The Fires_ by Joe Flood (2010) Cited in https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/18z6i09/comment...
But I could not find a quote in the Macnamara interviews from the _Fog of War_ https://www.errolmorris.com/film/fow_transcript.html as cited by https://forum.woodenboat.com/forum/the-bilge/28529-the-film-...
I tried looking for SJSU events and found the earlier Vintage Computing Fair talks, but at least I can trade this time capsule link from that era even if it doesn't quote me toon the Byte Shop specifically: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1977/04/04/bytes-and-chip...