CDC 6600 - Why so awesome?

[Paul Berger]

On 2016-06-22 10:12 PM, Paul Koning wrote:
>> On Jun 22, 2016, at 8:40 PM, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
>>
>> Which was the first machine to have an optical card reader (V brass roller)?
>>
>> For card based data processing, such as what my father did for Office Of Civil Rights, that speed improvement made a big difference.
> I'm not sure why that would make it faster.  I've only seen brass roller reading in an IBM card sorter, which ran probably as fast as, if not faster than, than the fastest card reader I've ever seen.
>
> 	paul
>
The sorter only read one column at a time, IBM also made a very fast 
punch/ reader the 2540 comes to mind, it could  1000 cards a minute and 
it still used brushes.  It read the card sideways into an 80 bit wide 
buffer and clocked the card data out the "normal" way on the channel.

Paul