The Sorter in the Corridor
1962 · Displaced Equipment · Work 597 of 1,871
A card sorter standing in a corridor outside the machine room, its cover on, a plain tag tied to the handle with string, coats hanging on a rack behind it, the sorter's row of pockets under the cover close to the lens, a few forgotten cards still lying in one pocket, buff with one corner cut and rectangular holes punched in a scattered pattern, the corridor receding into soft focus, a closed door with a small window at the end, fluorescent tubes along the ceiling, a linoleum floor, the machine in grey enamel.
- What it was used for
- The card sorter distributed cards into thirteen pockets according to the content of a single column: one pocket for each punch position and a reject pocket for cards unpunched in that column. IBM's manual of July 1962 gives the rated speeds: IBM 84 2,000, IBM 83 1,000, IBM 82 650 and IBM 82 Series 50 450 cards per minute. The decisive sentence is the one beside them: "One column is sorted at a time." Sorting on a multi-digit number meant running the deck through repeatedly; for five reports from the same cards the manual calculates that "the cards must be run through the sorter 34 times" – or 18 times in a better order. Then came hand work: "Sight Checking: After removing cards from each pocket, check the sorting."
- What was new
- Nothing about the sorter was new in 1962, and that is the story. Columbia University dates the Type 80 with 450 cards per minute to 1925 and the Type 82 with 650 to 1949; for the Types 83 and 84 the same table leaves the year explicitly as "19??". What was new was the job: on the same account, through the 1960s and 1970s, where computers were programmed on punched cards, the sorter more commonly served to put a dropped deck back in order — an accounting machine demoted to a repair tool. That it stayed anyway is shown twice over: IBM reissued the manual in December 1967 with the speeds unchanged, and the former customer engineer Russ Holsclaw reports: "The 082 sorter was the first machine CE's received training on when I started with the company in 1966" — although his assignment was to be the System/360.
What the sources leave open: No announcement or withdrawal dates for the 82, 83 and 84 sorters could be documented; IBM Archives does not cover these machines. The forms 080, 082, 083 do not appear as IBM type designations in the sources consulted: IBM writes "IBM 82, 83, and 84 Sorters", Columbia "Type 82". No figure for cards punched in 1962 was found.