1 Apr
2010
1 Apr
'10
8:02 a.m.
On 1 Apr 2010 at 0:17, Ian King wrote:
Interestingly, the idea of a timing mechanism hosted
on the medium
itself never occurred to Herman Hollerith or his successors, which I
guess speaks to their confidence in their engineering.
Not necessarily. If you look at Hollerith's card reader, it read the
entire card in parallel, using spring-loaded probes that would extend
through the card holes and touch a pool of mercury. No need for
clocking.
Serial card reading came later when the card was not manually read.
If you're going to automate card transport, then reading the card
serially actually is easier.
What was the proportion of readers that read colum-serial versus row-
serial? I believe the CDC 415 punch had its read station as 80
brushes, reading the card just punched row-wise.
--Chuck