Fifty Years Ago .... from the pages of Computer Weekly
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14th August 1975 computing, compiled by TNMOC volunteer archivist, Brian Aldous.
A selection of stories from Computer Weekly from 14th August 1975. The full archive of Computer Weekly can be seen at TNMOC, where there are special rolling displays of front pages from 25 and 40 years ago.
System to aid the blind: A series of practical aids for the blind, in the form of computer systems which convert bank statements, maps and any short documents, from recipes to instruction booklets for washing machines, into braille, have been developed by Warwick University’s Research Unit for the Blind, under the direction of Dr John Gill. Lloyds Bank has been using the bank statement system, Dr Gill’s own brainchild, for two months, sending magnetic tapes to the university for processing on a Rank Xerox Data Systems Sigma Five, situated in the engineering department. The computer supports a Braillemboss, a 10-chps teletype-compatible terminal developed and built by the Sensory Aids Evaluation and Development Centre at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The £2,700 Braillemboss, bought for Warwick by the Royal National Institute for the Blind, prints a braille statement, while a line printer produces a standard document for reference by the bank. (CW 458 14/8/1975 p1)
Flexidata cheque printer: A magnetic ink character printer, the SM 700, has been launched by Flexidata Ltd, of. Haverhill, Suffolk. It is to be sold worldwide by BPC Business Forms Ltd, part of the British Printing Corporation. Personalised bank cheque printing in MICR fount is the main applications area for the SM 700 and the system configuration includes an edge- punched card reader for entering a customer’s account and branch number on cards provided by the bank involved. This information is imprinted on a plate, along with non-MICR characters, and the plate is used later to print the cheques. BPC Business Forms has already installed several SM 700s at its Dunstable, Bedfordshire plant for producing personalised cheques. Flexidata also builds an alphanumeric OCR encoder, the SM 300, 78 of which are used by the Post Office to encode call data on tickets filled in by operators at manual telephone exchanges. (CW 458 14/8/1975 p3)
