Agenda 1401 Demo Meeting March 21, 2007

Who -Ed Thelen

"Works" on 1401 Restoration at CHM

What -Presentation to Senior Management about opportunities presenting

- some IBM Tabulating Room equipment
- and the IBM 1401 system that replaced the above

Why -Prepare for turn-over of equipment, software, materials

for presentation to the general public

How -Prepare plans and further needs

(documents?, communications?)

Handouts:

- "BigPrint" visitor name, date, 1401 history
- IBM 1401 CHM Restoration Project Status, by Robert Garner
- Inventory of Actions Available (below)
- Web site - http://ibm-1401.info/index.html
- or GOOGLE 1401 restoration

Previous presentation, to Senior Docents

- http://ibm-1401.info//Sched2007February.html#03
- Follow up meeting - ??

Senior Docents suggested two separate demos

a) tab equipment and usage,
b) 1401 system

Advisable for presentation

- A loud speaker system to overcome background noise of 50Hz power and air conditioner
- Very flexible and 1401 trained docents, to handle unexpected situations

The 1401 team really wants to place plastic skins on much of the equipment so that visitors can see inside!

Sounds -

- We have DVDs of various equipment (CHM and other) working,
the movies *need* editing and some narration.
- "Music", - we do *not* want the 1403 printer to be used
for "music". We have a CD ROM of some 1401 RFI music
from Iceland

Major problems

- 1401, 1402 card reader stability
- recruit & train new maintenance people

Transcript of meeting 

 Inventory of actions available
 
   Guests may 
      - key punch their names into IBM cards
            we have two (three?) key punches
            it takes a little getting used to:
                feed, register, punch, release,
                      register, release -
 
   Presenters may present Tabulating room functions
      - provide key punch familiarization
           feed, register, punch
         probably best manual operations
 
      - show sorter in operation
           either TV (one column)
           or actual multicolumn (say three columns)
 
      - show collator operations
           Merge two sorted decks  - 
                - one color master cards 
		- another color for detail cards
              master and detail cards
 
      - explain a payroll or billing operation
           ideas almost identical
             two sorted inputs - Master cards, Detail cards
             merged into customer oriented stream
             calculate and print customer oriented stream 
                   (no accounting machine - have to use imagination)
             separate out the Master and Detail cards with sorter
 
    
     1400 system operations
 
      - card read demo  - fast reader 800 cards/minute
              three color deck into three different pockets

      - print demo  - faster printer 600 lines/minute
                powers of 2 or something

      - Ripple read deck
            optional print everything, 
       
		ripple demo - read & print
      - faster thinking, can multiply, divide  :-))

      - 729 tape
            read card, write to tape, back space, reead, 
                 compare write/read, print both fields

      - combo demo with guest names read into machine
            and printed out
          (hand out to docents - same hand out to guests)

      - rattle tapes  - pseudo sort?
           - a short sort operation 
               - read say 500 pseudo "random" cards in
                     outputting in strings to tapes
               - succession of merges and sorts
               - print final sorted "random" cards