1 Apr
2010
1 Apr
'10
10:47 a.m.
On 1 Apr 2010 at 13:18, M H Stein wrote:
> As a matter of fact reading the card
'sideways' was a basic
principle
of the electro-mechanical punched card systems that
(along with card
sales) were IBM's bread and butter until the mid-sixties.
Now that I think of it, all of the earlier IBM equipment, with the
exception of card punches, were fed long-edge on, right from all of
the unit (sorters, 407 accounting machine, 519 reproducing punch)
record equipment, through peripheral card readers, such as the 1402
and 1622. But the 2501, ISTR was "short edge on"--or at least that
was the way the cards were ejected into the stacker.
I imagine that "long edge on" helped greatly to improve the
throughput at the expense of greater complexity.
--Chuck