[Simh] Various

[Paul Koning]

> On Feb 13, 2020, at 11:38 AM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Feb 13, 2020 at 10:50 AM Timothe Litt <litt at ieee.org> wrote:
> Among others, DEC OEM'd Documation card readers.
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=se0F1bLfFKY
> 
> Mark - sorry to go a little direct (simh) topic here [this sort of belongs on Warren's COFF mailing list), but since the Card discussion started here as I'm kinda curious and will ask it.
> 
> Did DEC actually sell that many?   In my years of working around DEC gear starting in the late 1960s, I think I saw a card read/punch only once on a PDP-6 IIRC, but it might have been a KA10.   I don't think I ever saw one on a PDP-8/11 or Vaxen.

At U of Illinois, the computer science department had a PDP-11 used for teaching assembly language programming.  It had a CR11 which was the input device for student programs.

Note that these are just readers.  DEC did not sell a card punch for the PDP-11.

> I certainly saw and used them on IBM 1401/360 systems, the Univac 1100s and CDC's.  I have not so fond memories of the IBM 1442, much less a 26 and 29 keypunch (and a couple of great stories too). 

CDC had its own card readers and punches, and those were also sold to some other manufacturers.  For example, the EL-X8 reader and punch are the CDC 415 and 405.  On those machines paper tape was more common, but some installations did have punched card I/O.

One interesting aspect of the 405 is that it punches a row at a time.  Usually the program interface is with data in columns, so the controller had to do an 80x12 matrix transpose.  Occasionally the job would be left to software (the X8 did this).

	paul