Data communications over telegraph circuits 1887
In some cases a telegraph circuit was the equivalent of just a wire, albeit with relays and carrier channels and...
some tab card drift ...
common practice in lots of shops (at least in 60s & 70s) was to punch sequence numbers in cols. 73-80 ... dropped & shuffled card decks could be put back in sequence by running the cards thru the sorter.
W.U. did an enormous amount of R&D on fax, none of which ever earned them much and none of which has...
when i was an undergraduate, the student keypunch room also had a ???? sorter, a 407 reader-printer, and another box (5??, may have been collator or a 519?). i have vague recollection of somebody claiming boxes could be connected together to perform some useful function ... the following shows a 403 and a 514 with some connector running between them
at one time, student registration and some other applications used tab cards that filled out with no2 pencil marks ... so it may have been 519 with optional pencil mark reader. howerever, there was some other set of tab equipment over in the admin bldg ... which included card printer ... i.e. i could get card deck punched from 2540 and get it sent over to admin bldg. to have holes in each card interpreted and the character printed across the top of the card.
the 407 was plug board programmable ... there was standard plugboard for 80x80 card deck listings ... you put the card deck into the 407 card hopper and it read and printed each card.
i remember playing around programming one of the extra 407 plug boards ... trying to perform other useful functions.
one of my first (paid) programming jobs was 360 application that read punch cards from student registration (possibly processed on 519? i don't remember) on a 2540 reader-punch into the middle output hopper. it did some analysis and if there was any problem ... it punched a card into the middle hopper behind the just read card. the registration cards were all plain manilla stock ... the cards in the input punch hopper had colored stripe across the top.
manual post processing of a registration card (held in trays containing 3000 some cards) could easily identify problem registration cards by the colored "marker" cards that could be seen when looking down at the top of the cards (in the drawer).
this describes another application using the 519 "mark sense" option:
my first actual paid programming job was doing a port of a 1401 MPIO front end for the 709. batches of card decks (things like student fortran jobs) were read on the 1401 and written to tape, the tape was then carried over to the 709 for processing. The 709 output was written to tape which was carried to the 1401 and resulting cards punched and-or printer output produced.
Anne & Lynn Wheeler Was there any way a tab machine (the reproducer?) could be set up to punch in incrementing sequence numbers automatically? When I had program decks keypunched...
i got to design and implement my own monitor; interrupt handlers, dispatcher, device drivers, storage allicaton, etc.
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Data communications over telegraph circuits 1888
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