We had a productive day reading 1401 cards for a CD. We successfully read more than half the available card decks. Brian Knittel was there right at 9 AM with the working Card Reader and upgraded the software on my laptop. Ron Mak showed up with two 2K boxes of 1403 program cards (Ron can you make a Jingle Bells Deck?) He's planing on joining us for a followup session the Wednesday. Bill Worthington and Ed Thelen deserve mucho Kudos for hanging in from 9 am to 5:10 pm when we stopped reading cards. Roughly 125 card decks were read and verified in Binary Format. I no longer plan to make an ASCII run since those that were strongly requesting ASCII, have changed their minds and now prefer binary. Deck sizes range from 2 cards to Bill Worthington's awsome 7,279 card source-deck of ASALT, an Autocoder program that translates other Autocoder programs into S/360 Assembler.

By gross count we did all 7 boxes and the additional deck Bill Worthington donated to the Museum, and the top shelf of the cart holding the card decks that originally came with the IBM 1401. We still have to do shelf 2 of the cart (about the same number of boxes as the top shelf) and two boxes from Ron Mak. If there are more boxes somewhere we need to know about them asap. Brian was kind and left the machine for us to use. As I mentioned above, we plan to complete the task on Wednesday.

Although collecting software may be a never ending task, I feel we made a real dent and it's possible that we will reach our original committment to put the available 1401 on a CD soon. I just hope that light I see down the tunnel isn't a locomotive. :-)

Thanks to everyone who helped out!!!

Bill

PS. Allison, Worthington's card decks (7 boxes) were returned to the Accessioning Room at the end of the day.

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Bill Selmeier 20720 Maureen Way     voice  (408)257-7670
Leader Saratoga, CA 95070     mobile (408)655-3400
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