Anybody here ever watch an IBM card sorter run I always thought those were so cool
I actually can't recall if it was an IBM brand or not that I worked with at SWBell back in '78... I do recall how exciting it got when there was a card jam which ended up with the whole batch all over the floor...
Luckily, that wasn't my job at the time... I was just doing the batches that were then run through it to verify the totals we had done by hand on a 10 key. If everything balanced, the accounts were then credited for the amount they sent in... In less than a year, we switched over to the optical readers which was when I started working on and fixing the terminals... because the guys they hired to fix them were a bit slow at diagnosing the problems when we had them. I was able to make the terminals process at up to 3600 items an hour if I had tweaked the terminal just right... later when I asked what they were spec'd for... I found out they were only suppose to run about 600 per hour per terminal.