12 Dec
2010
12 Dec
'10
9:52 p.m.
On 12/12/2010 12:54 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
<snip>
Back in the "good old days", IBM made the "Verifier" punch. It was
part
of the 029 punch series, but did NOT punch data onto cards. Instead, it
compared what was being keyed in to what was on the card currently going
through. If it came up with a discrepancy, it punched a notch on the
12-edge. If the whole card matched, then it put a notch in the column 80
END of the card.
A deck of cards consistently notched on the end was a reassurance that the
original punching and the verification matched, and therefore was probably
pretty accurate.
Of course, that doubled the price and the amount of work for having a
service bureau punch your data.
<snip>
The IRS data center in Kansas City used this method, but was doing it
key to disk as in 8" floppy. Machines looked identical to the 029 / 059
(thanks for that Wil) but had a slot for the floppy on the unit.
They were taken to a Honeywell mainframe with 25mb drives and copied to
the 25mb drives. These were flown nightly to Washington with the data.
There was probably 1000 entry stations in one room, and the same number
of verifiers in another.
The operators were using a system to enter data off the usual 1040 IRS
forms. I didn't get in the entry rooms due to security restrictions.
Perhaps someone here worked on these systems, I'm just relaying what I
recall from a late night tour by one of the guys who maintained the
Honeywell hardware, and was a fellow scrapper. This was sometime in the
time frame from 68 to 70.
Jim