11 Apr
2024
11 Apr
'24
6:32 p.m.
On Wed, 2024-04-10 at 23:52 -0500, CAREY SCHUG wrote:
I was an operator (summer job and weekends during
college), we had a
bunch of model 30s, each with at least 2 card readers and 2
printers. most work was BG or F1 running jcl which read in a 1401
program from cards.
My boss in my first full-time job had worked at a bank in Dayton, OH.
They had an NCR 315, with a device called CRAM, or Card Random Access
Machine. That machine used cards the same size as punch cards, but made
of mylar and coated with mag-tape oxide. It had a compressed-air-driven
mechanism to extract a particular card from a file, drag it through
some read-write heads, and put it back. They loved the CRAM sort
routines. The machine made a hell of a racket, so they had it in a
sound-proof room.
An IBM salesman convinced them to try out a 360/30 with a Data Cell.
After a month, the salesman came back and noticed the Data Cell in the
same sound-proof room as the CRAM. He asked "Why is it in there? It
doesn't make any noise!"
The answer was "We hope it will learn some software."