Browse over 10,000 Electronics Projects

Inside Card Sorters of 1920s – Data Processing with Punched Cards and Relays

Inside Card Sorters of 1920s – Data Processing with Punched Cards and Relays

[tps_header][/tps_header]

Punched card sorters were a key part of data processing from 1890 until the 1970s, used for accounting, inventory, payroll and many other tasks. This article looks inside sorters, showing the fascinating electromechanical and vacuum tube circuits used for data processing in the pre-computer era and beyond.

Herman Hollerith invented punch-card data processing for the 1890 US census.[1] Businesses soon took advantage of punched cards for data processing, using what was called unit record equipment. Each punched card held one data record, consisting of multiple data fields. A card sorter sorted the cards into the desired order. Then a machine called a tabulator read the cards, added up desired fields and printed a report.

For example, a company could have one card for each invoice it needs to pay, as shown below, with fields for the vendor number, date, amount to pay, and so forth. The card sorter ordered the cards by vendor number. Then the tabulator generated a report by reading each card and printing a line for each card. Mechanical counters in the tabulator summed up the amounts, computing the total amount payable. Many other business tasks such as payroll, inventory and billing used punched cards in a similar manner.

Example of a punched card holding a 'unit record', and a report generated from these cards. From Functional Wiring Principles.

 

Example of a punched card holding a ‘unit record’, and a report generated from these cards. From Functional Wiring Principles.

The surprising thing about unit record equipment is that it originally was entirely electro-mechanical, not even using vacuum tubes. This equipment was built from components such as wire brushes to read the holes in punched cards, electro-mechanical relays to control the circuits, and mechanical wheels to add values. Even though these systems were technologically primitive, they revolutionized business data processing and paved the way for electronic business computers such as the IBM 1401.



Advertisement1


How a sorter works

A card sorter takes punched cards and sorts them into order based on a field, for example employee number, date, or department. One application is putting records in the desired order when printing out a report.[2] Another application is grouping record by a field, for instance to generate a report of sales by department: the cards are first sorted based on the department field, and then a tabulator sums up the sales field, printing the subtotal for each department.To sort punched cards, they are loaded into the card hopper and fed through the sorter. Cards are read and directed into one of the 13 card pockets: 0 through 9, two “zone” pockets, and a Reject pocket. This is very different from a typical sort algorithm — cards aren’t compared with each other — so you may wonder how this machine sorts its input.

IBM Type 80 Card Sorter.

 

IBM Type 80 Card Sorter.

Card sorting uses a clever technique called radix sort. The sorter operates on one digit of the field at a time, so to sort on a 3-digit field, cards are run through the sorter three times. First, the sorter deposits the cards into ten bins (0-9) based on the lowest digit of the field. The operator gathers up the cards from the bins in order (0 bin first and 9 bin last) and they are sorted again on the second-lowest digit, again getting stacked in bins 0-9. The important thing is that the cards in each bin will still be ordered from the first pass: bin 0 will have cards ending in 00 first, and cards ending in 09 last. The operator gathers up the cards in order again, yielding a stack that is now sorted according to the last two digits. The cards are run through the sorter a third time, this time sorting on the third-lowest digit. After the last run through the sorter, the cards are in order, sorted on the entire field.

The radix sort process is fast and simple. You may be familiar with comparison-based sorting algorithms like quicksort that compare and shuffle entries, taking O(n log n) time. Radix sort can be implemented with a simple electric mechanism (along with an operator busily moving stacks of cards around), and takes linear time.[3] Although the sorter’s hopper can hold 3600 cards, it can sort as many cards as desired, as long as the operator keeps loading and unloading them.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

 


Top