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Re: Remington Rand punched card

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On 2019-12-08, Scott Lurndal <scott@slp53.sl.home> wrote:

> hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com writes:
>
>> On Thursday, December 5, 2019 at 6:10:17 PM UTC-5, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>
>>> If you zoom in on the second one you can see the same 90-column
>>> cards that I played with a bit in the late '60s.  The cards are
>>> the same dimensions as IBM's 80-column cards, and have the same
>>> 12 rows, but the 45 columns are divided into upper and lower tiers -
>>> perfect for 6-bit codes.
>>
>> IBM cards used to have round holes and 45 columns.  But then
>> around 1930 IBM developed the rectangular 80 column format.
>> Univac kept the round holes, but went to a 90 column format.
>
> I've got some blank Burroughs 90-column cards here in my hand.
>
> Although I never saw any 90-column gear during my years with
> Burroughs/Unisys, even after the acquisition of Sperry/Univac.

I have some punched 90-column cards.  I once tried to write a
program to read them on an 80-column reader.  The columns that
were more or less aligned with the 80-column positions came out
OK, but the ones that fell between the 80-column positions were,
as I expected, unreadable.  Too bad - I even had code working to
translate the 90-column cards' arcane encoding, which followed
no pattern that I could discern.

The Univac card readers of the day derived column timing from a
little drum attached to the feed rollers; one head wrote timing
marks to the drum and and another head read them back after a
suitable rotation of the drum to advance the card to the next
column.  The card reader on the Univac 1005 (a hopped-up electronic
answer to the IBM 407) had an extra head on this drum, and could
read both 80- and 90-column cards.

-- 
/~\  cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid (Charlie Gibbs)
\ /  I'm really at ac.dekanfrus if you read it the right way.
 X   Top-posted messages will probably be ignored.  See RFC1855.
/ \  "Alexa, define 'bugging'."

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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 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

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