Quote:
Originally Posted by HossC
Here is the Texaco Building on Wilshire. It's almost directly opposite the Langdon and Wilson Offices I posted pictures of last week in post #34761. This is Julius Shulman's "Job 2407: Welton Becket and Associates, Texaco, inc. Building (Los Angeles, Calif.), 1957, 1958".
[snip]
And to finish the Shulman pictures, a room full of IBM Card Punch machines.
All from Getty Research Institute
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These are early (ca. 1949) IBM 024 or 026 keypunches with the numeric-only (adding machine style) keypads. The machines looked the same but the 026 printed on the card.
This picture shows the operation of the machine clearly:
unca.edu
Blank cards were loaded in the hopper in the upper right, fed from right to left under the 12 vertical punches inside the shiny bar, and then moved to the output hopper in the upper left. The machine at the left foreground in the Shulman picture has its little door open exposing the "program card." This was wrapped around a drum and the punches in it controlled things like jumping to the next field or duplicating a field from the previous card.
The vertical black objects on some of the tables appear to be some kind of card holder that I have never seen before.
IBM cards were very useful objects to have around. They were exactly 0.01 inches thick, which made them useful for shims, a nice size for pocket notes and bookmarks, and very water and fire resistant. The latter meant that destroying cards with classified information on them required special equipment. A common Christmas decoration in those days was a "wreath" made from IBM cards rolled into cones and glued in a circle.
IBM assigned a part number to the card (5081) and called them a part of the machine, like the screws and gears. This meant you had to buy your cards from IBM, a restriction that was struck down in an antitrust settlement in the 50's.
I spent many an hour at 026's at school and in the Air Force and believe me, those suckers were LOUD. The noise in that room must have been horrendous during working hours.
Cheers,
Earl