23 Mar
2016
23 Mar
'16
1:02 p.m.
On 2016-Mar-23 17:49:19 +1100, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com>
wrote:
They used to have big, mechanical machines for sorting
cards. What
did they call them? Collators?
Sorters:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/sorter.html
You select a column and it sorts the cards into bins by the value of that
column. You then stack the cards out of all the bins back into the feed
hopper and sort by the next column. You'd need 8 passes to do a full sort
(given sequence numbers in 73-80).
--
Peter Jeremy