The Pinfeed end.
While trying to find a McBee computer from the ’50s, I ran into a peculiar system that used a similar coding. Here’s the presentation from a computer society meeting in 1955:
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The best way to cover this subject is to describe a machine system known as the Stanomatic. The name Stanomatic is derived from the words Symbol Translator Automatically energizing Office Machinery.
Many of you may be wondering why The Standard Register Company, with its more than 40 years of manufacturing business forms and feeding devices, has entered into this particular field. We are manufacturers of continuous business forms and feeding devices for application to any type of business machine, such as typewriters, tabulators, etc. Our feeding devices are based on the principle of the pinwheel or sprocket feed. Our forms all carry holes down the sides, which we call Kant-Slip holes, and when these forms are fed into any type of business machine, the holes down the sides of the paper and the pinwheels or sprockets in the machine feed, align, and register these forms automatically and accurately.
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The Stanomatic system looked like a direct competitor to IBM systems:
It claimed to have a sort of OCR capability, resembling the later MICR magnetic numbers that appeared on checks:
As I started exploring patents, I realized that the pinwheel setup was deeply familiar. I had used carbon-based invoices with sprocket holes, and I had typeset many such forms at Cromwells. Earlier I modeled a sprocket-type invoice machine as part of the Cave Gas set:
With all of this familiarity I’d never heard of Standard Register, based in Dayton along with a vastly more familiar Register company.
Standard originated pinfeed multiforms back in 1912. Pinfeed wasn’t needed for a single copy, but the VAST majority of business forms require at least one copy, often three or more. If you try to hold the printed top and bottom copies together with the carbons, you’ll always slip, so the penstrokes on the copy won’t be in the proper lines and boxes. Glue at the top is one solution, but still allows a fair amount of slippage for large and complicated forms.
The Standard machines were called Autographic Registers, since they were designed to let you write something while holding the sandwich of papers with interleaved carbons in register.
Here’s the original pinfeed register machine, proudly bearing THE STANDARD in its wrought-iron structure. This version has three source rolls, for bottom copy, carbon, and top copy. [I’ve cheated a bit: the original patent carried the carbon in a side-mounted roller which seemed to defeat the purpose of keeping all the sheets moving together. Later versions had all layers in the same line.]
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Here’s a display of the full Standard range, from the original pinfeed to the streamlined invoice machine, to the various types of Stanomatic computer products.
Polistra and friends at work entering and feeding cards:
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The computer systems were all aimed at keeping track of business activities. The fanciest was a Data Recorder, with a timeclock for dating the forms, a keyboard for entering numbers manually, and a cardreader for inputting Hollerith punch data.
I’ve animated the Data Recorder entering the six digits 123456, with McBee himself doing the data entry. The main computer console is showing the McBee version of the code on the left and the Stanomatic version on the right. The first four dots are identical in both: 1247. McBee doesn’t use the fifth dot for numbers, reserving it for alpha symbols. Stanomatic uses the fifth dot for a parity bit, so every entry has exactly two dots active. (I detailed the 1247 code and its justifications in my piece on McBee.)
Standard built its own computers and even patented and designed its own magnetic core memories for the Standard 1247 coding. Unfortunately the Stanomatic computers didn’t get anywhere, and Standard abandoned them after a while. Standard’s main business, printing up forms and building the machines to use them, kept growing toward a peak in the ’80s. They gradually shifted into the more abstract side, developing software for business management on PCs, and tried to clear out of unfashionable physical machines, but their loyal customers still wanted real pinfeed systems. They built the last machine in 2004. After that, it appears that Standard fell into the dot-com free money trap of mergers and acquisitions, and essentially collapsed in 2013. They were bought by another software firm, Taylor Communications, which is still running and still in Dayton.
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I mentioned glued forms. The simpler solution to the register problem started to appear around 1960, with the far more famous NCR forms, also made in Dayton. NCR pulled me into my usual questions and conclusions about invention, and I’ll delve into those questions in the next item.
Polistra's Mill 