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Re: Remington Rand punched card

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On 2020-03-12, robin.vowels@gmail.com <robin.vowels@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thursday, March 12, 2020 at 1:08:36 PM UTC+11, Dan Espen wrote:
>
>> Not sure where this is going or if I want to get on the bus,
>> but I've never seen a card torn into more than a couple of pieces,
>> normally they just jammed together and got curled up or ripped a bit.

I suspect that the term "confetti" is an exaggeration.

>> But all my experience is with IBM card readers, and some EAM equipment.
>> They were all designed to sense jams and come to a rapid halt.
>
> That's right.
> Ours sensed that if the second reading station did not receive
> a card, the reader halted.  If it was a misfeed owing to a worn card,
> nothing was lost, and no damage done to the card.
> At worse, a "foreign" card might be torn slightly.

One of the best jams I saw resulted in two consecutive cards being
torn lengthwise about half their length, and winding up overlapped.
(Try pressing your hands towards each other with fingers extended
to see what I mean.)

One jam left a card in contact with a rapidly spinning roller,
which burned a hole about 3/4 of an inch in diameter in the card.
We saw smoke coming out of the machine.

> The card punch was another matter.  Occasionally the stacker
> mis-stacked a card, and every card after that was compressed
> into a fan about 3 mm wide.  You could get about 100 cards
> concertina'd into a small space until the punch began to shreik.

Yes, I've seen some nice (and amazingly neat) accordion pleats
put into cards.

> At one stage we had some cards printed to a special order, with green ink.
> The ink was blotchy, and occasionally two cards were stuck together
> at a blotch. That caused a jam.

One shop that went through a lot of cards bought them wherever they
could find them to save money.  Most of these were overruns from
other applications, which is how I built such an interesting
collection of differently-printed cards.  Sometimes the quality
of these cards was definitely dodgy.  I suspect that the thickness
of some of them wasn't that tightly controlled, which resulted in
one operator turning the air blue as a result of all the jams.
When you fanned and joggled a fresh deck of cards before putting
them into the punch, you had to work a bit; the cards often stuck
together.  I remember picking up a handful of cards and smacking
them against my other hand to break them apart.  I almost broke
my hand; they were like a block of wood.  Sometimes we'd stand
blocks of cards on edge on a machine or table top, where they'd
sit in a solid block with no rubber band holding them together.

> Not to be put off, I noticed that the card feeler that detected
> whether that a card had been fed, had been pushed up by the jam.
> There was a spare set of contacts on that feeler, which I wired
> up to the "not ready" circuit.  Presto, no jams at all, because
> as soon as a card began to buckle, the sensor activated the "not ready"
> circuit, and the card punch stopped without feeding a card (well,
> just a tiny bit past the throat).

Nice.  My best card reader fix was when a timing belt broke.
The first tihng I did was go to the CE cabinet and get out the
manuals for the reader.  I looked up the part number of the
broken belt, then called the service department.  They were
used to service requests of the form "the machine doesn't work,"
so when I told them a timing belt had broken they started the
game of Twenty Questions to figure out which belt it was.
("What does it look like?  Where in the machine is it?"
Et cetera.)  I read off the part number and I could hear
the person on the other end light up.  He quickly dispatched
a CE with the needed part.

Meanwhile, we had lots of work to do and didn't want to wait
until the CE arrived.  So I took a lot of rubber bands and
wrapped them around the pulleys in place of the missing belt.
It took a couple of seconds for everything to spin up, but by
loading the program and getting it ready to start reading,
I was able to use the manual feed button to spin up the card
reader and feed the first card, then start the program before
the card reader motor timed out and shut down again.  It worked
well enough for production to continue.

-- 
/~\  Charlie Gibbs                  |  Microsoft is a dictatorship.
\ /  <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid>      |  Apple is a cult.
 X   I'm really at ac.dekanfrus     |  Linux is anarchy.
/ \  if you read it the right way.  |  Pick your poison.

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Thread

Remington Rand punched card hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com - 2019-12-05 12:29 -0800
  Re: Remington Rand punched card Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> - 2019-12-05 23:09 +0000
    Re: Remington Rand punched card hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com - 2019-12-06 13:30 -0800
      Re: Remington Rand punched card Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> - 2019-12-06 13:45 -0800
        Re: Remington Rand punched card Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> - 2019-12-06 13:49 -0800
        Re: Remington Rand punched card hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com - 2019-12-06 14:27 -0800
          Re: Remington Rand punched card Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> - 2019-12-06 19:20 -0800
            Re: Remington Rand punched card robin.vowels@gmail.com - 2020-03-10 06:21 -0700
              Re: Remington Rand punched card Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> - 2020-03-10 11:14 -0700
                Re: Remington Rand punched card J. Clarke <jclarke.873638@gmail.com> - 2020-03-10 19:34 -0400
                Re: Remington Rand punched card robin.vowels@gmail.com - 2020-03-10 17:58 -0700
                Re: Remington Rand punched card J. Clarke <jclarke.873638@gmail.com> - 2020-03-10 22:50 -0400
                Re: Remington Rand punched card robin.vowels@gmail.com - 2020-03-11 06:52 -0700
                Re: Remington Rand punched card J. Clarke <jclarke.873638@gmail.com> - 2020-03-11 19:11 -0400
                Re: Remington Rand punched card robin.vowels@gmail.com - 2020-03-11 18:19 -0700
                Re: Remington Rand punched card J. Clarke <jclarke.873638@gmail.com> - 2020-03-11 21:38 -0400
                Re: Remington Rand punched card Dan Espen <dan1espen@gmail.com> - 2020-03-11 22:21 -0400
                Re: Remington Rand punched card robin.vowels@gmail.com - 2020-03-11 21:26 -0700
                Re: Remington Rand punched card Dan Espen <dan1espen@gmail.com> - 2020-03-11 22:08 -0400
                Re: Remington Rand punched card robin.vowels@gmail.com - 2020-03-11 21:21 -0700
                Re: Remington Rand punched card Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> - 2020-03-12 19:08 +0000
                Re: Remington Rand punched card robin.vowels@gmail.com - 2020-03-10 17:56 -0700
          Re: Remington Rand punched card robin.vowels@gmail.com - 2020-03-10 06:17 -0700
            Re: Remington Rand punched card Dan Espen <dan1espen@gmail.com> - 2020-03-10 12:26 -0400
              Re: Remington Rand punched card robin.vowels@gmail.com - 2020-03-10 17:52 -0700
      Re: Remington Rand punched card Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> - 2019-12-06 13:46 -0800
      Re: Remington Rand punched card scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) - 2019-12-08 17:08 +0000
        Re: Remington Rand punched card Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> - 2019-12-08 18:59 +0000
        Re: Remington Rand punched card Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> - 2019-12-08 20:57 -0800
  Re: Remington Rand punched card robin.vowels@gmail.com - 2020-03-10 06:07 -0700

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