🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <122...@linus.mitre.org>, jcmo...@mwunix.mitre.org (Joe Morris)
writes:
> Any chance this was the Univac VIP keypunch?  This clown (early 1970's) was
> so noisy that nobody wanted it anywhere near their office.  It used a
> vibrating ratchet to drive the card under the punch head, and the printing
> on the card was done by a one-character-wide drum which like every other
> drum I've ever seen was totally incapable of printing a straight line.

     Ah yes, I used many a 1710.  This was the one with the 4-inch-
high keyboard that had an extremely light touch except for the space
bar, which for some reason you needed a sledgehammer to depress.
Great for spraining your thumb.

     The 1701 was the cheapo version that couldn't print, and they
later came out with a 1610 which punched at half speed.  There was
a super-duper 1810 produced, but not too many of them sold, since
keypunches by then were becoming obsolete.

     They did manage to beat IBM to the market with an electronic
keypunch, though, so they sold a bunch of them.  I was talking to
an IBM serviceman who said that although IBM was already designing
the 129, Sperry caught them flat-footed.  IBM rushed the 129 out
before it was completely ready, and he hated servicing them.

     What was really scary was that Sperry actually packaged these
beasts without a keyboard and offered them as the model 608 card
punch for their OS/3 line, for those too cheap to get a real card
punch (the tank-like 604 which could punch 200 cpm all day).  The
innards originally appeared in a huge box called the 603, which
was found on many 9200 systems; it would punch 75 cards per minute
if you punched right up to column 80, but would go faster if the
last column you punched wasn't as far down the card (a mechanism
would yank the card out without requiring those pusher blades to
ratchet it all the way through).  It could go as fast as 200 cpm
if you punched no farther than column 14.  And, of course, it could
read cards at 200 cpm as well.

Charlie_Gibbs@mindlink.UUCP
"I've seen The Exorcist about a hundred and sixty-seven times,
and it keeps getting funnier every time I see it!"  -- Beetlejuice