083 sorter

Wow! I thought there were sorters up to 2,000 cards per minute, but
wasn't sure.

Understanding using electronic sensors to read the cards is one thing.

But how did they get the mechanics of the sorting bins to open and close
so quickly and so precisely?

Were these 2,000 cpm sorters in common use, or were slower models
more common? We had a sorter, but I don't remember the model or
speed.

Actually, in hindsight, they didn't use it very efficiently. They
used to pre sort input decks before feeding them into the S/360-40.
Even under emulation, I suspect the computer could've sorted them
faster than by hand, not to mention the operator's time. Of
course, maybe under emulation, even with an attached "1311" (a
2314 pretending) it was limited.

The mechanical part of the sort occurred just after the throat,
where there was a bunch of flexible metal strips running from the
throat, one to each bin. A gap was opened up between two strips,
and once the card was between the correct pair of strips ("chute
blades") it's destination was set.

There was the 082, perhaps 1000 CPS, I can't recall.
There there were several earlier slower sorters. One had a
rotating commutator/switch which could be used to ignore
particular values in the sort column.

--
John Hall - Digital Magic <Digita...@cadvision.com>
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" (Arthur C. Clarke)

I *think* I recall the number of the optical sorter being the 084?
It would do 2,200+ CPM. I don't think the mechanical 083 could go
that fast.

One place I worked used to get inventory cards from a large steel
company and had to sort them 25 columns alpha on the 084. There
were close to 250,000 (not a typo) each month. The service
bureau told the sorter operator when they were coming in. He'd
go home for four days, get thoroughly rested and then come in
to take care of the job singledhanded. Took an average of 26 hours
to make the complete pass over them barring no jams, or other
complications.

Funny and true story... We had a dolt of a systems analyst (long
first A) about the time when cards were going out and online editors
were coming in (super Wylber, if anyone remembers). This analyst
decided that he needed to store the ten or twelve cases of BLANK cards
somewhere. I suggested to him that we should write an Easytrieve
program to read the cards and store them on tape. That way when we
needed them again, we could just punch them off the tape. this guy
was all for it and took him nearly a full 1/2 hour to realize what
I had done to him! (I had read that in a computer humor magazine
and finally found a match where I could use it!)

I worked as a Jnr. IBM operator for a big govt. agency in the mid
50s.
I think I still have calluses from buffing the cards to allign them
before placing them in the feeder. That was a real art because a
misalligned card could jam up the cards so bad at that speed that it
could take you 1/2 a day to unjam the mchn. Then of course you had to
try and match up the pieces like a jigsaw puzzle to be able to
reproduce them. The "do not bend, spindle or mutilate" thing was
mainly because of the sorters , most of the other machines could
handle them if they weren't too worn. It was no joke to us, cause you
had to reproduce each card even if the edge was slightly scuffed or
risk a jam and sometimes you'd miss one.
The rotating switch determined the collumn on which you were sorting
IIRC. We also used interpreters to print data on top of the cards,
collaters to merge and duplicaters, all controlled by wiring pegboards
for the particular function you wanted. The keypunch
data entry was done by about 30 typists fulltime in an adjoining room.
We used to call it our harem.
The most interesting of these sorters was called a Statistical sorter
which would keep track of the number of cards entering a bin depending
on the criteria you selected to sort them. Can't remember the # , it
might have been 101 or 111.
At that time IBM would only lease their machines. so all repairs had
to be done by an IBM tech. I think competition forced them to
relinquish this lucrative policy.

ciao larry

"Common sense is actually nothing more than a deposit of
predjudices laid down in the mind prior to the age of 18."
...Albert Einstein

Yup, I erred.
The 083 was 1000 CPM and the 084 was 2000 or perhaps 2200 CPM.
The 084 had vacuum on the picker knives and throat, because the
card deck could not fall fast enough for the next card to get
picked otherwise.

Robert Schuldenfrei
S. I. Inc.
32 Ridley Road
Dedham, MA 02026
Voice: (781) 329-4828
FAX: (781) 329-1696
E-Mail: b...@s-i-inc.com
WWW: http://www.tiac.net/users/tangaroa/index.html

I never worked in a CDC shop, but I recall seeing one of the card
readers being demonstrated by a beaming sales rep: he took a punched
card, folded, spindled, and mutilated it <g>, smoothed it out with
his hand, and fed it through the reader without a problem.

The only vacuum-based card reader I did have experience with was the
abomination that DEC sold with the DECSystem-10. Had that been the
only such card reader I had experience with I think that I would have
left the industry; it was absurdly noisy and not what I would describe
as "reliable;" the saving grace was that there wasn't much need for
it (our IBM system did the card-to-tape quite nicely, thank you, and
in any case few DEC users would be caught dead with a punched card).

Joe Morris

The CR11 was much better, apart from its tendency to get bored and
just feed a card or two for fun when you weren't looking...

It used air alone to handle the cards, which went through almost
without being touched by the mechanism. However it had one spectacular
drawback. It needed the weight of 100 or so cards, or the nice plastic
weight that came with it, to balance the pressure of the air blast.

If you had a 1000 card deck, then you had to keep feeding by hand, as
the hopper only took 300ish. What was fun to watch was someone half way
through a 1000 card deck who answered the phone without putting the
weight on.

The stack in the hopper would get down to 100 or so, and it would
start to heave, then suddenly the air blast would win, and the last few
dozen would go *straight* *up* several feet.

--
I am Robert Billing, Christian, inventor, traveller, cook and animal
lover, I live near 0:46W 51:22N. http://www.tnglwood.demon.co.uk/
"Bother," said Pooh, "Eeyore, ready two photon torpedoes and lock
phasers on the Heffalump, Piglet, meet me in transporter room three"

This was the CDC-produced 405 card-reader - a wondrous but very effective
beast. The platform on which the cards were fed was horizontal and
was vibrated (around 30 or 40 Hz I'd guess) to reduce their friction
so that the "pusher plate" could push them with only moderate force
to the gate. The cards were picked by a perforated drum that had
a vacuum maintained inside it and sucked the cards into the feed.

It was OEM'd quite a bit in Europe because, by means of flipping
the card bed, it could be made to read 51 column cards - a common
format there for "Giro" cards which, much like checks, were issued
in a booklet (made of 80 column cards) and when you made a payment,
you tore one out leaving a "stub" behind.

Actual speed escapes me, but 1100 c.p.m springs to mind - not
that spectacular as I believe another vendor based in Poughkeepsie
had one that reached 2000 c.p.m.

The only "serious" problem with using this machine overseas was that it
had an air-pump to create the necessary vacuum - the air was filtered
through a sort of muslin bag mounted inside a glass jar of what I call
"Skippy peanut-butter" format. If you dropped this, then replacements
were very easy to come by Stateside - but not in Europe.

Because a very large important government machine in Holland used
such a card reader - and couldn't even be bootstrapped without it,
we had of necessity to find a replacement in a hurry. The only similar
jars I knew of in Amsterdam were to be found in liquor stores
(raisins-in-gin, peaches-in-brandy, and similar beverages) and
the only way to see if the thread on the jar fit the thread in
the card-reader was to purchase aforementioned jar, consume
said contents, and perform an empirical fit test. On failure,
go purchase a different candidate jar and try again.

After about 36 hours of fruitless search (actually a surfeit of
fruit) somebody had the brilliant idea of calling the American
Embassy in The Hague - and indded they had a jar of real
honest-to-gosh Skippy with ANSI standard threads...

After that, the computational wheels of the Dutch Social Security
could resume grinding while we nursed major hangovers.

Jitze

--
If replying, remove spam.filter from above address

With perfect gravity, the prof explained that the problem was the punches,
not the readers. Optical readers could make that tape FLY.

Solution - small, controlled electrical discharges to punch that paper fast.

The prototype ?

A machine that put half inch holes in one inch paper tape at 10 baud :-)

Noisy, too.

Cheers, Andy!

I was a bit stumped by this - had to make 2 passes to get the sense
right. I thought that "with perfect gravity the limit is the punch
and not the reader but since in Cambridge the gravity field is a
bit wobbly the limit is the reader" at 1st pass :) doh!

cj

Do you mean the punches on the two 1130s, one in the basement, and one
in the numerical control setup next to the machine shop?

If so you have just given me a *severe* attack of nostalgia.

I've just realised I've replied to the reply not the original post, OH
HITLER!{1}

{1} This is used by some people as being less offensive than Oh God!

If you had a deck you repeatedly read in a computer card reader,
an part of the card edge would get worn and the card wouldn't read,
and had to be duplicated.

There was a little crank to move the "tester" to the proper column.
I think the rotating switch was to supress a certain bit of the card
so all cards of that number would go to the reject bin. I think this
was so you could pick out all say 5 cards with all others going to
the reject bin without disturbing sort order. It may also had
something to do with alpha sorting.

Interpreters could print on any part of the card face, though I've
never seen this done. It used to drive us new kids crazy since
the interpreter was 60 column and not directly over a card column
like a key punch. We had an 029 keypunch set up to interpret, slow
and noisy but working. The Interpreters could also "edge print"
a big number.

I believe that was part of a government consent decree in the 1950s.
Tom Watson and his father had a big fight on this. Tom Jr wanted to
settle and move the company forward while Mr. Watson Sr wanted to fight
it out. The father gave in to the son at the end.

Renting gave the customer many advantages in terms of systems support.
If you rented, the company had to keep you happy otherwise you'd dump
their equipment and they'd lose your business.

Ads in early 1960s Datamation still show IBM pushing punched card
equipment. For small users, cards were most cost effective than
computers which remained extremely expensive, even a S/360 model 20.
It was the System/3 introduced in 1969 that got the cost down for
small users.

Suddenly my brain gave a lurch and I remembered all this. You use the
little handle to lift the reading brush, then turn the crank to position
it over the chosen column. If a bit is switched on with the rotating
switch, and there is a punch in that row, then the card is deflected
into the right bin, if not it goes into reject.

To do an alpha sort:
Select rightmost column of alpha field.
+ Switches 1-9 on 0XY off.
Sort
Collate 0-9, leave rejects alone
Switches 1-9 off 0XY on
Sort
Collate Rejects, X, Y, 0
If more columns, select next column and repeat from +

I think that was it. Basically for each column you want to get the
blanks before the letters, and then the letters in order. Since the
letters are all two punches, the one in X,Y,0 being most significant
and the one in 1-9 being least significant (this gives you 27
combinations, the extra one IIRC being &), you can do an alpha sort
that way.

The last time I did this (25 years ago) the sorter had been modified
with two nice big chrome toggle switches, one marked ALPHA/NORMAL, and
the other ZONE/NUMERIC or something like this, so that you didn't have
to fiddle with the little rotating switch, you just banged the big
handle across.

No - the 27th letter of the alphabet was / (0 and 1). Legend has it that
it was skipped in the alphabet because in early days there were problems
if a column had punches in 2 adjacent rows.

& was the 12 punch ('Y'); 11 was the - or X punch.

I remember a punch test known as the '1 A J /' test.

--
Julian & Mary Jane Thomas
j...@epix.net http://www.epix.net/~jt
In the beautiful Finger Lakes Wine Country of New York State!
--------------------------------------------------
Programming today is a race between software engineers stirring to build
bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to produce
bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning.

From 1967 until into the '70's, I don't recall anybody but IBM being
allowed to maintain IBM machines. You couldn't even paint the outer skins
of the boxes, although some customers with enough systems did it anyway.
That was a "big incentive" to buy your gear -- then you could have it any
color you wanted.

I definitely don't think non-IBM maintenance came along until early in the
1970's.

I don't /think/ the System/3 was that early. The 360/20 wasn't even out
until about 1972. IBM had an 1800 system (process control type stuff) and
an 1130, both out in the late 1960's, but I think the System 3 was a fair
bit later on.

We had the same thing on our CDC 3300. It would have been a 300- or 400-
series box, since the 500's were the printers (we started with a 501 and
later got a ... 509??). I want to say the reader you're thinking of was a
401, but I'm not positive.

It was exceptionally cool. The "wheel" that picked cards was filled with
small holes that pulled vacuum, and the edge that kept two cards from
feeding at once was set a /critical/ distance away from it. It'd haul one
card and the next one would be moving almost instantly, and it moved them
/fast/. Ours did modest damage to the catching side of the card when it
slammed into the "I've read these already" tray, so after you'd fed a deck
a couple of dozen times you could easily have problems reading it.

The feed rate was, IIRC, 1200 CPM. And because of the very high speed and
the very active vacuum pump, the box was phenomenally noise. It had two
great inventions, though -- a flat input tray, and a flat output tray. And
they held a couple of boxes of cards, and you could easily add more input
while the reader was running. If you got sloppy taking output from the
tray while the reader ran, though, you had to be /really/ careful not to
let the friction pad slam back against the remainder of the deck -- that
would jam the reader something fierce if the next card came out just then.

Ed, I was attending a fly-by-night programming trade school in 1969
and they had a 360/20, 2x2410(?) atrocious tape drives, ONE 2311 disk
that had a whopping 7 meg of capacity on it, MFCM, and a printer of
which the model number escapes me at the moment. It made this hideous
noise, I recall that sounded like a pair of Diesel locomotives
attempting to start out hauling a 1000 car train, kachunk, kachunk,
kachunk... Ahhh, I remember, it was a band printer! It has a bar
that slid back and forth in front of the paper.

I think that IBM had either developed those things with HASP RJE
in mind, or maybe relegated it to only serving as RJE, don't
recall precisely (I surprised I can recall anything from that
time period!)

Bill.

That was the 1443 which first appeared as part of the 1440 system.
--
Nick Spalding

Would that be a 1443 printer which had a type bar (not band)?
This was the usal printer for 1620's, but was used on other systems.
I too remember a 360/20 in the 1969 time frame.

The only thing I ever saw a /20 being used for was as an RJE terminal,
but I doubt that they were designed with HASP in mind. In 1969,
HASP was still something circulated through the user grooups, and IBM
was trying to claim you didn't need it.

The 360/20 was somthing of a strange beast. It was called a 360
but it was not really the same archetecture. It executed only
a subset of the instructions. The other 360s (40, 50, 65, 75, 85, 91)
differred in speed and hardware implementation technology, but were
essentially instruction set compatible.

>Ed, I was attending a fly-by-night programming trade school in 1969

Or perhaps a 2415? These were the S/360 versions of the obnoxious 7330
drives, with vacuum cups (they were too small to be called vacuum columns)
and miserable performance. They *were*, however, less expensive than
the 2401 drives (which were the S/360 version of the famous 729 series
of drives).

Ah, the MFCM. It's been a few months since the last a.f.c thread
on that clunker...

Probably a 1443-N1. Not a band printer; it used a bar which could
be ordered with 13, 48, ??, and 63-character options. The machine
was a mechanical nightmare (not as bad as the 2321 Data Cell, but
that would be almost impossible) and was always in need of the
tender ministrations of the field engineering staff, but it produced
*excellent* print quality.

Joe Morris

>"Bill B." <wbe...@us.oracle.com> writes:

[snip]

I saw them as the printer mechanism in the 2780 RJE terminals that
we had on campus. Indeed, the print quality was wonderful - much
better than what the 1403s delivered.

One day, due to a glitch in the line, perhaps, one of the 2780s
printed a line of garbage that ran right off the right-hand edge
of the page. It was then that we realized that the 1443 had 144
print positions, rather than the standard 132. As a friend quipped,
"That printer goes out of its way to print everything for you."

We still remember that day when something terrible happened to the
printer. Its happy thunk-thunk-thunk was interrupted by a horrendous
*CRUNCH*. The print bar was bent in half.

I can't hear bar printer stories without remembering the good old
Univac 9300, which slung a bar back and forth fast enough to do a
pretty decent job at 600 lpm with a 63-character set. Someone told
me of a bar that got loose when the access panel on the side was
open - it flew the length of the room and embedded itself in a wall.

--
cgi...@sky.bus.com (Charlie Gibbs)
Remove the first period after the "at" sign to reply.

Ummm... Ours was a mixed CDC and IBM shop, and I definitely don't recall a
faster card reader than the 405. (And that model number sounds right to
me. Maybe the punch was the 407?? CDC used to name some of their card
equipment after the building addresses in which they were developed, so for
at least a while you could actually locate the reader's birthplace by going
to #405 of the right street in Minneapolis or St. Paul.)

The industry was tough, in those days. Not like today...

Edward Rice wrote:

> <some snippage here>

Reminds me of a trick played on one of the computer operators at Oregon State
University while I was a student programmer at their computer center. It seems
that
someone discovered a way to tear off a bit of a card, fold it "just so" and
wedge
it into a special place in the output hopper. Someone did that late one slow
night (I'm innocent, I swear!) and then brought a rather largish 1000-odd card
deck
in for a run (it wasn't a real "job.") The somewhat bleary-eyed operator took
the
deck to the reader and started it. Before he could hit clear, there were about
200
cards sailing all over the place. One of the best gags we had that term.

Gary
g...@bother-someone-else-please.ao.com
(remove from bother to please to reply)

And then there was the 360/25, which was actually a 370 product introduced
early.

It was intended to ease the path of those upgrading from a /20 to a
real 360. In effect it could pretend to be a /20 or a /30 according
to which microprogram you loaded into it, from the card reader.
--
Nick Spalding

Dont forget there was also a 360/22.
I think they build them from old 360/30s.

Did anyone anywhere use such a beast ???

gv

IBM did indeed build them from old 360/30s which were coming
off rental (the 360/22 was introduced after the 370 line had
started to ship).

360/22's made the best HASP RJE workstations. The University
of Illinois used several; the one in Urbana drove three 1403-N1
printers, with a 56Kbps comm link attached via a 2701.
--

Bob Shair rms...@delphi.itg.uiuc.edu
Open Systems Specialist Champaign, Illinois
/* Opinions expressed are mine... go get your own! */

Agreed.

--
Please remove the (hopefully obvious) spam foiler from address when
responding.

Anybody familiar with the cardreaders Sperry used circa the late 70's
that would split a deck into streams, with alternating cards being
read at different stations, and then reassemble the deck in its original
order? As I recall, the failure mode was rather spectacular!

JMHO, of course.

[...]

:Anybody familiar with the cardreaders Sperry used circa the late 70's

I think you might find some arguement here ... once the mechanical parts
of the subsystem were properly adjusted (which kept our Digital Systems
Technicians on their toes), they held up pretty well at sea, aboard:

USS Mars
USS San Diego
USS Concord
USS White Plains

The biggest failure rate was on the long card slide ... one little burr,
and you'd have to replace the slide (which cost around USD 10K back in
1978). The Sperry 1100 series were reliable machines in their day, and it
is a pity we were wasting ours on COBOL (but then again, those ships were
all supply ships).

--
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"Usenet II -- because it's time for October" (Malcolm Ray in n.s.u.)

Yes, but the 083 sorter actually worked. As for the data cell, it was one
of those things that made people pray to the god of preventive maintence
(which was usually done quite often). The 083 sorter you could actually
let "civilians" use.

--
t...@cagent.com (Home: t...@johana.com)
Please forward spam to: anna...@hr.house.gov (my Congressman), I do.

> guenther vieth <guenthe...@kaufring.de> wrote in article
<350541...@kaufring.de>...

I don't recall a 360/22. But there was a 360/44, which was like a 360 but
lacked the SS
(memory-to-memory) instructions. As a result, it couldn't run "standard"
software, and
it even had its own operating system, PS (pronounced "piss").

No, Edward Rice did not write either of those two lines. He/I wrote that
the 360/25 was really a pre-announcement 370.