IBM 029 Card Punch and ASCII Machines

[Paul Koning]

> On May 10, 2015, at 2:36 PM, William Donzelli <wdonzelli at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Correct.  And a number of DEC operating systems had card reader support.  I haven’t seen them very often on DEC machines, but for example RSTS can handle at least 026 and 029 card codes, and some vague memory says there may have been a “1401” table as well.
> 
> This should come as no surprise.
> 
> We often think that DEC machines were all doing cool things like
> running railroads or controlling high energy physics experiments, but
> a large number of PDP-11s spent their lives running plain old business
> software.

Indeed, but I think that even in that application card readers were not all that common.  The batch card model was more an IBM thing, with DEC systems tending more to terminal input.

	paul