Service bureaus (Was: Tek 4051 firmware listing

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. If done right, the punching and verifying would be done by two different keypunch operators, to reduce the possibility of the same mistake repeated being verified, particularly with 0 and O, etc. Eventually, some of the service bureaus realized that instead of punching, and then verifying, that it was a lot less work to verify and then punch! So, they would verify entire boxes of blank cards, and then use those for the raw supplies for punching. Hmmmm. Here's a card where somebody made a mistake, realized it, cancelled that card, and punched it over again. But the bad card has a verify notch! Thirty years ago, an old friend who was a good solid 100WPM typist wanted out of her job at UC. So, I helped her set up "The Microcomputer Service Center" to do contract Apple and TRS80 data input. The name choice was flawed, as people would call thinking that it was a repair business. She made a decent living at it, but when I left City College of San Francisco, she took over teaching the classes that I had had, and made a career of teaching. Don't get me started about how I made the wrong decision about which school district to work at when I went to Peralta! -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com