On Tue, 26 May 2009 11:18:58 -0500, Rick Fochtman <[email protected]> wrote:
>... >the 1442 "Multifunction Card Machine", also known as "Mother >Fletcher's Card Mulcher"? ... I remember things a bit differently. Back in the late '60s I was an operator in an IBM Datacenter and Busuness System Center. In the latter we had, among other things, a S/360 Mod 20, an 1130, and a couple very different models of S/3. As I recall, it was the Mod 20's 2560 that was the card muncher - so branded by the CE who was in every other week or so trying to get out the remnants of the cards that we couldn't quite reach with a card saw. I've never seen a device with so many places for a card to get stuck! It had 2 hoppers, 5 stackers, a read station, a punch station, a print station, and an amazing number of bits and pieces to route the cards through their appointed rounds. BTW, the doc claimed those initials stood for "MultiFunction Card machine", but that just proved the authors never used it. BTW #2, when it worked it was a very handy device. The 1442 had one hopper, 2 stackers, a read station and a punch station. (I'm not sure about print.) Ours was attached to the 1130 but I think it could be attached to many different processors. I don't recall it ever giving trouble. It was MUCH simpler than the MFCM. I don't recall it had a name - just a number. One of our S/3's had a 5424 (I think) - the MFCU (Unit instead of Machine.) It handled the S/3's 96 column card and had just 4 stackers. Otherwise, it's description was about the same as the MFCM. It almost never jammed, and when it did it was trivial to clear. IBM obviously learned from its mistakes. Pat O'Keefe ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
