Punch Card Sorter Help

The input hopper is located in the upper right. The card "pockets" (output stackers) are located on the lower left, and arranged in the traditional order starting with the "9" punch. "R" indicates the reject pocket. The hopper and stackers behave in the normal fashion, except that the all stackers contents are saved in a single dialog. This dialog presents checkboxes for each pocket, plus one for a "Pick L-R" option that reverses the order of pockets in the file. By default, the order will be R-L for all selected pockets, which means that the right-most selected pocket will be first in the file (on top of the deck). Pockets that are not selected will remain un-changed after the save, but all saved pockets will be cleared. The "Recycle" option is a short-hand to simply take the resulting card stack and place it on the input hopper. This option does not require entry of a file name (any file name is ignored). Viewing or discarding stacker contents is done on each stacker individually.

The column selector/indicator is located immediately left of the input hopper. Selection switches for digits/zones are located to the left of the input hopper and column selector. The START and STOP buttons should function as on original equipment. The run rate is set to 20 cards per second.

The column selector may be operated using mouse clicks. Left click will decrease the column by one. Right click will increase. Using SHIFT with either will jump to the next (higher or lower) multiple of 10. The middle mouse button will jump to column 40.

Selection switches are used to suppress the indicated rows during sorting. The ALPHA switch overrides the others and suppresses (only) digit rows 1-9. These switches effectively form a "mask" on the column data, causing suppressed rows to be seen as "not punched". Thus, a card that has no punches except in suppressed rows will appear as blank and be sent to the reject pocket. Details in the manual are a little fuzzy, so this implementation may need revision as new information arises.

The file "example.pcd", included in the "hwprogs.tgz" bundle, contains 500 punch cards with likely data for use with both these punch card data processing machines as well as the Honeywell 200/2000 computer. The data is formatted as follows.

ColumnsContents
1-13Numeric (10-13 is "customer ID")
14-28Alphabetic (first name)
29-43Alphabetic (last name)
44-53Numeric (44-48 is zip code)