Huh, that's a coincidence. Going through a recent bequeathment to the Australian Computer Museum Society, I'd just yesterday opened a box with manuals, some cards, and other bits for the same system. See pic, with manual cover illustration of the system. It was IBM trying to produce a word processor and email, before the technology was really up to it. You typed onto paper, with backspacing and overtyping to get it right, then saved to the mag card. That could be read back and printed out, to get a clean copy. Then you could snail mail the mag card to someone with another machine. Or just post the printed letter I suppose, but how old fashioned! A lease document with the set shows that in 1981 the price was $5000 (AU). Or leased over 48 months, total rent of $6682. My job now is to find out what happened to the actual machine, since the contents list says it's present, but it isn't. Fun fact: according to the listing the modified selectric typewriter (heavy) and the magcard 82 processor (cabinet in the photo, supposedly about 50 Kg) are linked by a "non-plugged cable". Brilliant. Guy At 10:46 AM 3/01/2020 +0100, you wrote:

The magcard selectric was capable of a lot of basic word processing functions as could the MT/ST before it.? One function it was really useful for was creating personalized form letters. The body of the letter could be stored and personalizations filled in as it printed.? The MT/ST and magcard also had a model with a composer version of the selectric connected.? The composer version had an escapement mechanism that could do proportional spacing, this mechanism was complicated and from what OP technician told me tricky to adjust, and it didn't help that customer using composers where very picky about the print quality as composers where often use to prepare copy for printing.? I have also seen selectric mechanisms that used a lead screw to move the print head which would be an easier way to implement proportional spacing. Watching a video of an electronic composer typing suggests it may have used this mechanism as the carriage motion looks smoother that what you get with an escapement rack. ?? There was also a version of magcard machine that had a IBM Executive type bar typewriter attached, the Executive also did proportional spacing. There was also a selectric called the "Memory Typewriter" that could store documents on a wide loop of tape the was inside a slightly enlarged selectic.? The last version of the magcard machines where equipped with a daisy wheel printer in place of a selectric.

I've got a couple of the drives for those cards somewhere in case someone needs/wants one; rollers to feed the card in and out and a solenoid ratchet to move the head across track-to-track. Wonder if you could build an 80-column card reader out of one... ;-)

On 1/3/20 4:13 PM, Al Kossow via cctalk wrote: Turns out there is a bit of info in the office system 6 CE manual I just got They have 50 tracks and have a dummy character to align the card when loaded