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David Scheidt

Something like this was done with early "high density" computer storage. Magnetic cards would be filed together in a bin and each card in the bin had a physical address represented by notches or holes around the periphery of the card. The RCA RACE used notches for the card address and although I've never seen the insides of one, I was told that the NCR CRAM used holes. The cards were extracted from their bin based on this physical addressing scheme. Of course each bin was part of the address too and so each bin would have one of each type of card. I had many "fun times" with the RACE and still have one of its cards around here somewhere. The CRAM was the center of attention at NCR's 1964 New York Worlds Fair pavilion. Both used relatively thick plastic cards. A CE once told me that he took the used RACE cards and used them for hinges for his dog door. IIRC there were 128 cards per bin in the RACE. I do not believe the bins were dismountable in any normal operation.

Of course then there was the somewhat later and "infamous" IBM Data Cell. Although I never used one of these I do have a couple of the cells. Each has 20 "tiny bins" and cards in each bin have a pair of unique to that bin "teeth" projecting from the top of the card to physically indentify them, 10 cards per bin so 200 cards per cell. I'm told that one of the reasons for the downfall of the RACE was that to get this increase in card count, the individual cards were made of much thinner material that the RACE and CRAM and the mechanism tended to crumple them. The individual cell units however, were dismountable, just like the IBM disk packs of the time. I have no idea what the storage capacity of any of these systems were but they were significantly greater than contemporary disk drives. They traded access time for storage capacity.

Chris AN GETTO$;DUMP;RUN,ALGOL,TAPE $$