allisonp(a)world.std.com (Allison J Parent) wrote: ... HP 3000 Series II. Well, that's what we had at my high school in 1977. Sometime along about 1980 it got upgraded to a Series III. Micros weren't in the schools in 1977 but some of us were aware of them (I used to hang around the Radio Shack and poke at the TRS-80). HP brought the 2000A timeshared BASIC system out in...1967? I know there were some (later models, 2000F and 2000 Access) still in service at various Washington DC suburban area high schools into the early 1980s at least, maybe into the mid-1980s. Prince Georges County (Maryland) and Fairfax County (Virginia) both had them, maybe others too. ... We had a mark-sense reader way back then in 1977. An HP 7260A, hooked up as a pass-through device between the terminal and the 3000, but the 3000 had some special "driver" software (in the form of the FCARD intrinsic, which sent the right escape sequences down the wire to get the card reader to Do Stuff). We used it daily to "run attendance": each student had an associated IBM card, and the homeroom teacher would send the cards for absent students to the office. Read cards into disc file, run programs to generate report (print report on continuous-form ditto paper with tractor holes) and update database with attendance information. We also used it twice quarterly to do progress reports (mid-quarter) and report cards (end of quarter). These used mark-sense forms that were pre-printed, then printed in the line printer, then sent out to the schools and teachers where they were torn apart along their perfs, marked, folded, spindled, mutilated, and sent back for reading. Note that bit about being torn apart along perfs. Feed a few thousand of these through (the 3000 at our site did processing for about a dozen schools) and the torn perfs leave lots of paper dust all over in the reader. Twice a quarter, we used to have to call the CE to come out, take ours half apart, and vacuum all the paper dust out so we could read the attendance cards. After I graduated I found that they'd replaced the 7260As with Scan-Tron readers. I saw one once but, well, it's been 14 years or so and I didn't really look at how it plugged in -- given that they had it talking to the 3000 somehow I would bet that it did RS-232. I think I remember being told that they had had to write some software to deal with it, but I guess that wasn't too big a deal as they had also changed the mark sense forms, from two that would fit down a slot designed for IBM cards to one that was wider and didn't need to be kept synchronized with a partner. -Frank McConnell