IBM 029 Card Punch and ASCII Machines

[William Donzelli]

> 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.

Yes, but PDP-11s were right in that sweet spot in the business
environment. Plenty of businesses had all their records on cards, even
if they had service bureaus do all the processing, and DEC wanted to
grab part of the end of the punch card era of thinking.

One has to wonder if that very specific strategy did not work as
planned, as we rarely see any actual PDP-11s with card machines.
Perhaps the service bureaus themselves did the media conversion, and
DEC then moved in after that cards were gone. The support for handling
cards still stuck around for the stragglers.

--
Will