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The content of 1 DVD corresponds to 5000 punch card cabinets with 10,000 cards each.
This collection had already existed for many years on Rheinfelderstrasse in Kleinbasel under the name Cosecans - Verein für ein Museum der Lochkartentechnik. The curator, Oscar E. Wyss, had to give up running this museum for health reasons and left his equipment to us. We are delighted that his life's work can be preserved in Basel and will not disappear from the region or even from Switzerland.
For this purpose, however, space had to be created in our exhibition in Pratteln. So it was a good thing that our host, ColoBâle, offered us an additional room in which to set up a large game lounge. So we reduced the original old Game Lounge by half and used the removed equipment as the basis for the new Game Lounge. The historic IBM machines mentioned above are large and very, very heavy and can hardly be pushed over a threshold of more than 5 cm in height. Nevertheless, we managed to maneuver these machines from the basement on Rheinfelderstrasse into a truck, transport them to the magnet area and lift them up to the second floor of ColoBâle using a forklift. We do have a lift that we can use for the museum. But it stops half a meter above the level of the museum. This is sufficient for small appliances, but not so much for our new machines.
In critical situations, the 8-eye check is justified 😉
After extensive planning and preparation, the time had come on July 29. Practically all club members helped until the almost impossible was accomplished. The machines have now been installed and are not only an attraction for our technicians, who are working hard to get the machines up and running, but also for our visitors, who spend a lot of time in this area of the museum. It is quite impressive to show that a lock card cabinet with 10,000 cards has a storage capacity of just 1MB disk. Or to put it another way: one DVD has as much storage space as the contents of 5,000 such cabinets and the storage space on a newer hard disk with 5 TB even requires 5 million of them, i.e. 50 billion punch cards.
When we are a little further along with setting up the devices, we will also report on their structure and function.