IBM 016 Electrical Duplicating Keypunch - 1929.

Just a quick post before “punching out” for the night.   The meetings I’m attending this week are at an IBM facility.   IBM celebrated 100 years of innovation in 2011.   Let’s hope the next 100 are as impact-ful.  These and other former state-of-the-art artifacts grace the lobby.  The placard for this one says:

IBM 016 Electrical Duplicating Keypunch.  The development of automatic feeding and ejecting mechanisms for keypunches and duplicators helped to increase the speed of key punching and reduce operator fatigue.  The Type 016, introduced in 1929, fed cards into the punching unit and automatically removed or ejected the cards after punching.  It was withdrawn from marketing in 1960.

This one’s even older.   Not electric.  Notice the hand crank.

IBM 501 Automatic Numbering Gang Punch - 1926.

And it says:

IBM 501 Automatic Numbering Gang Punch. Brought to market in 1926, the Type 501 automatically recorded on a series of punched cards common fixed data from a master card. This punch operated at the rate of 125 cards per minute, and was withdrawn from marketing in April 1948.

I guess progress is always relative to where you’ve been…

Verifying was the procedure, after the keypunch operator completed “punching” out the required data on an 80 column card, that replicated the strokes in another machine. If there was an error, a big red light would blink, requiring further verification of the data. The redundancy was necessary step to insure accuracy. All told a very tedious process. The residue from the punches were called “chits”, which were fun to play with but impossible to get out of the rug. They made great confetti though.

Key punch card

We had 3 key punch machines and 2 verifiers arranged in the living room of our 2 bedroom apartment. She also operated a tech school on the side, training wanna be key punch operators. Interestingly, she trained and placed the very first African American tech woman ever in that city. Although the money flowed freely for a year or two, eventually things imploded and we were forced to move back to Detroit.

Things have a way of working out though. She got a job as a computer programer at Ford Motors working the midnight shift. She pretty much had the place to herself. I accompanied her upon many an occasion to play video games the Ford programers developed during their free moments. Just me in the dark at an ancient keyboard in front of a huge cathode ray tube screen. This was long before the first video game “Pong” hit the streets.

At that time, advanced memory repositories occupied several ice-cold floors where huge disc platters and tape drives crunched the data. Now I can carry all that information on a thumb drive or two. Incredible, astronomical advancements, yet the essential principals remain the same. The human brain is still the most awesome technological and entrepreneurial tool in the universe.

The human brain remains the most amazing technological and entrepreneurial resource in the universe