19 May
2024
19 May
'24
4:30 p.m.
On Sun, May 19, 2024 at 9:13 AM Mike Stein via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
wrote:
What I find a little sad is that the accounting
machine world has been
almost entirely ignored.
The punched card batch processing systems such as IBM's 402/403/407
machines and peripherals are documented and even still in existence here
and there, but the manual entry machines that could once be found in every
bank branch or small office and were the foundations of computer companies
like Burroughs, NCR etc. have largely disappeared and are pretty sparsely
documented.
It's quite interesting to follow their evolution from motor-driven purely
mechanical monsters full of cams, levers and springs corresponding to and
actually called accumulators, registers etc. to completely solid state
electronic systems with disk and tape drives, displays and terminals, line
printers, communication capability, PPT and punched card devices etc. etc.
Along the way there were many interesting innovations like small 96 column
punched cards, magnetic striped ledger cards and automatic feeder/stackers,
multiple cassette drives equivalent to the open reel versions, custom
devices like the 'core counter' (a non-volatile electro-magnetic device
that emitted a pulse for every 10 input pulses) etc.; a shame that so
little documentation and examples remain today.
Before my dreams were derailed, I was working on acquiring and assembling a
complete punched card data processing set up, just to experience it.
It would be fun to do such if I still had the resources and the time and
nothing else to do, but it takes a lot of time and resources, whereas an
old digital computer, even some of the big power hungry beasts of the 60s,
can still do something more interesting than just move paper around.
I would compare it to the reason why interest in old radios peaked and then
died out in the 2000s: all the people who had an interest in that stuff
passed on; and there's only so much an old radio can do. It can receive
and deliver an audio signal, poorly. That's an activity one might rather
enjoy on modern equipment. The same with old punched card equipment. It's
fun to run cards through it, but other than that, most people don't even
get what it's doing. It's doing one thing of the whole "computing"
process, poorly. There's no much interest in that, and only so many people
can devote the space, power, and maintenance to an entire punched card data
processing setup.
That being said, I believe the Haus zur Geschichte der IBM
Datenverarbeitung (House of the History of IBM Data Processing) in
Sindelfingen, Germany may still be demonstrating that very thing, or at
least they were when I visited in the mid-2000s with Hans Franke.
Here's an old article about it ==>
https://www.smh.com.au/technology/history-galore-at-ibm-museum-20050201-gdk…
Sellam