Card Dialer Business Phone, 1962
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Artifact Overview
This Western Electric Card Dialer phone used punch cards to encode business information and to communicate with corporate computers. This phone would have been part of a system purchased by a large business. Each of the alphabetical cards would have stored useful telephone numbers; the other punch cards would have held programs to run on a central computer.
Artifact Details
Artifact
Telephone
Date Made
1962
Creators
Place of Creation
Location
Not on exhibit to the public.
Object ID
89.0.767.1
Credit
From the Collections of The Henry Ford.
Material
Plastic
Composite material
Metal
Color
Beige (Color)
Gray (Color)
Dimensions
Height: 4.375 in
Width: 9.5 in
Length: 8.5 in
Inscriptions
On handset: Western Electric / MADE IN USA / G3
On bottom: BELL SYSTEM / MADE BY / Western Electric / 661A1 / TEL SET / 11-62
Buttons for punched cards: RELEASE / START
Keywords |
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Related Content
SetPunch Card Technology
- 10 Artifacts
The IMSAI 8080 was a clone of the Altair 8800, the first mass marketed personal computer. It was a popular "kit computer," requiring assembly and programming. With no keyboard, toggle switches allowed input and LED lights signaled output. This could be modified using an IBM I/O typewriter. The donor, O.S. Narayanaswami, was a mechanical engineer interested in the educative power of computers.