Data communications over telegraph circuits 1888
 |
In some cases a telegraph circuit was the equivalent of just a wire, albeit with relays and carrier channels and other stuff in the...
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 by the staff, they would put in pre-printed sequence numbers from the coding form. However, when I punched my own decks I was too lazy to do so. I was lucky, it was very rare me to drop a deck and never a big one that was hard to rebuttemble.
It was probably a summary punch connected to the tabulator. A frequent job of the tabulator was to calculate sub-totals and totals from a deck of detail cards and print them on the report. You could set it to print the detail lines or just the total lines. You could also set it to punch out a card (via the summary punch) for each total line and use those for subsequent processing.
At Los Alamos during WW II and early post war installations, end users connected the tabulator to the calculator to generate iterative totals. This type of thing became the foundation of the IBM CPC, a popular "poor-man's" computer in the postwar era. While obviously not as powerful as a real stored-programmed computer, it was far, far cheaper in those years when real computers were rare and expensive.