On 21/05/2013 15:16, William Donzelli wrote:
Recently we
were talking about a business automation device that used paper tape for storage;
typically someone would enter data like an address on paper tape, then it would read the
paper tape back through to print the address on an envelope for billing. It was a specific
device/name and it was very 60s/"Mad Men" in appearance. I can't remember
the name. Someone found one in an attic in MN or something.
The IBM 870 can do this
(and a lot more), but I do not think this is
what we were talking about.
--
Will
Flexowriter with multiple punchs? When I worked at Refuge Insurance in
Manchester, England we used them to both type "posh" policy documents
and at the same time the data typed was captured on to paper tape. These
were the converted to Magnetic tape via a converted Honeywell Key to
Tape machine. We also had a Honeywell Key to Disk machine which despite
its name still used magnetic tape to transfer its data to the
"mainfame" a Honeywell H3200 with 1200BPI NRZI high speed tape drives.
The drives were amazing things but as we had 4 Million "industrial
Branch" life policies spread over around 14 reels of tape well worth the
extra cost.
We did however have one nasty event, when testing on the standby
generator all went well until job end when the tapes went into re-wind.
As the fourth drive started to rewind the the generator stalled as it
couldn't handle the load. There was a big bang and our small Scotish CE,
Jim muttered some words that his namesake on Startrek could never use on
TV. Any way the fix was not to get a bigger generator. We simply took
the tapes off-line at End of Job and then manually re-wound the tapes
one at a time....
Dave
G4UGM