IBM 029 Keypunch has arrived

[Roger Holmes]

> Date: Wed, 27 May 2009 16:44:17 -0400
> From: William Donzelli <wdonzelli at gmail.com>

>
>> I found
>> someone who could supply them for 100 dollars but he wanted a  
>> cheque from a
>> US clearing bank which of course I can't do, and things went quiet  
>> when I
>> asked about alternatives.
>
> If you get desperate for relays, and need to buy these "golden" ones,
> I am sure someone on this list in the USA can act as an agent for you.
> Contact me offlist if you get to this point. Same with getting US
> electrical supplies.
>
> Sorry, I have no spare relays. I need every one I can get my hands on.
> I probably have about 800 sockets in my collection, and they are not
> all filled.

Thank you for your kind offer, though I must point out that the 100  
dollars was not for relays, it was for circuit diagrams for the IBM  
836, the top of the range version of the 026 keypunch. I have some  
spare relays from a card verifier.

In case anyone here is too young to know what I'm talking about, most  
data to be input on cards to a mainframe was punched back in those  
sexist days by one of the girls in the data preparation department on  
a key punch machine which has a keyboard and punches holes into pieces  
of card. The cards were then given to a different girl who fed them  
through a machine called a VERIFIER. She would also type the data on a  
keyboard and the machine would compare what she typed to what was on  
the card. If there was a miss-match, a red light would come on and a  
notch cut in the top of the card. The data would then be checked  
against the original, maybe by a supervisor, though I was never  
familiar with the internal workings of any commercial DP department,  
and the either the faulty card corrected or the mistake of the  
verifier operator ignored.

Today of course no checking of input data is done, mistakes just go  
through until either a customer complains 15 times via a call centre  
in India and eventually gets through to a manager who will listen and  
correct it, or the customer runs off with a million dollars which has  
been paid into his account in error, not to be heard of until he's  
spent it all and then goes bankrupt. Not that I'm complaining,  
verifying cards all day must have been a soul destroying job I would  
not wish on my worst enemy. I always got the impression the DP girls  
were just filling in the time until they could become housewives and  
mothers, which I imagine is much more rewarding than DP, and useful to  
humankind than sitting at a verifier and turning off the brain.

Before any lady list members comment, that was then, this is now, I  
was brought up in the 50s, am a dinosaur and likely to remain a  
bachelor dinosaur, my only regret is not being able to personally  
extend my family tree, which I have left to my brothers and my sister,  
who have made me an uncle, great uncle and recently a great great  
uncle, and I'm only 56 so maybe time to add another 'great' before I  
die.

Wandering off topic I'm afraid.

Thanks to everyone's help and advice with the 110v sockets, and yes I  
did mean sockets when I meant plugs in one particular e-mail. I am  
currently (no pun intended) looking into prices of small static  
inverters (and UPSs, some of which seems be also able to do frequency  
conversion, think battery charger and inverter) so I can keep the  
keypunch standard if possible. I think a good quality power strip  
screwed to the wall is probably the easiest solution to the socket  
problem, as I don't want wandering sockets for visitors to trip over  
and  I can't be bothered learning about how US 'receptacles' attach to  
the back of their boxes instead of being screwed to the front as is  
normal in the UK. Life's too short and I've got to write a program to  
read data from old paper tapes into my Mac so I can recover some data  
for the ICT/ICL 1900 preservation group.

Roger Holmes
Technical Director, Microspot Ltd
Half of the ICT 1301 restoration group of the Computer Conservation  
Society.
Author of MacPlot, MacPalette, 3DWorld, Microspot Interiors and also  
responsible for maintaining MacDraft and all other Microspot products.
Oh, and I have 7 classic cars to look after/restore/enjoy too, and  
hold a classic car/computer show at my home once a year, 12th July  
based on the theme of a TV show which was filmed on the 35 acre farm,  
which launched the career of Catherine Zeta Jones, called 'The Darling  
Budss of May'.
Oh and I have a disabled 86 year old mother to look after now my  
father has died a couple of weeks after their 67th wedding anniversary.
Like I said, life is too short.