7 Oct
2022
7 Oct
'22
8:07 p.m.
On 10/7/22 17:10, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
Then of course some card devices feed the narrow edge
(1 column) first rather than the top or bottom row. CDC had a reader that worked
column-wise and a punch that worked row-wise, so the interface logic for the punch needed
a transpose operation while the reader doesn't -- given that both would transfer card
data as a word per column. But Electrologica used the same hardware without the transpose
logic in the controller, so the software would see columns from the reader but would have
to construct rows to send to the punch.
CDC 405 reader and 415 punch. Both pretty noisy, but I found the 415
more aurally irritating--and easily overheated if you ran a big punch job.
Early IBM gear read only the first 72 columns of an 80 column card;
hence the restriction for early FORTRAN to 72 columns. Made sense
reading row-binary into 2 36-bit words.
Generally, the 405 was very fast and trouble free--until a card was fed
that got stuck in the works, resulting in lots of "accordion pleated"
cards in the stacker. It was a marvel of engineering, with its
machine-gun rattle of 1200 cards/minute. You could load two boxes (4000
cards) in the hopper.
--Chuck