4 ms·
Funnily enough, you'd be hard-pressed to read cards much faster than that today. The limit was on the mechanical side, moving the cards fast enough without jam
by retrac 3y ago
Funnily enough, you'd be hard-pressed to read cards much faster than that today. The limit was on the mechanical side, moving the cards fast enough without jamming or tearing them. The processor would have been 99% idle if reading 1200 cards/min was all it was doing. On big systems, since cards were such a bottleneck, they would often be read in with a small computer or dedicated card-to-magnetic-tape machine.
</random Hollerith trivia>
- rented_mule 3y agoIn ~1990, I was working on Xerox high volume printers that cost $100K-$1M each (AT&T bought fleets of them to print phone bills). They printed at 50-135 pages per minute on ordinary paper (not card stock). Many types of engineers worked on those printers, but I was always fascinated by the aerodynamics engineers working on the paper path, sometimes meters long, through the printer. Early prototypes of those machines would constantly have horrific paper jams because the aerodynamics weren't tuned well enough yet. Some of these jams did significant damage to internal parts.