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Now that we MRC engineers in Iowa City were affiliated with Westinghouse Learning Corporation (WLC) - a member of the huge Westinghouse Electric Corporation (WEC) with a central R/D Facility in Churchill, PA, and staffed with hundreds of Ph.D's, scientists, engineers, and technicians - we were expected to coordinate our local R/D and product development efforts closely with the central WEC R/D facility (who supported WLC's goals in R/D). Accordingly, in my role as Engineering Manager of the WLC/MRC facility, I made numerous trips to WEC-Churchill, but my first one in 1968 - recounted in this little tale - was the most memorable. Speaking frankly, I was not all that impressed with the 'hands on' assistance that they could (or did!) render us on our niche projects related to OMR scanners. Yet, every year I was required to submit my R/D plans to Churchill on a 'budget ladder' funding basis that would consume a significant portion of my local MRC product development budget

Scope and Contents Background: Following the acquisition of MRC by Westinghouse Learning Corporation (WLC) in June 1968, there was an increased emphasis on marketing the MRC product line of Optical Mark Reader (OMR) scanners developed in Iowa City, and a limited number of high-cost systems had been sold in 1968-76, both domestically and in Europe and Asia, such as the RASCOL/W301's, W201's, and W600B models ("high-cost": e. g., costing in the $100K + range up to several hundred thousand dollars). Our archrival in the emerging WLC OMR scanner hardware sales at this time was National Computer Systems (NCS) located in the Minneapolis, MN area, with regional sales offices distributed so as to cover the entire United States. We at WLC sincerely believed that our OMR products were superior in speed, accuracy, and maintainability, based upon research data from many sources. In fact, we won several major 'shootouts' against NCS based upon the customers' favorable viewpoint of these critical factors, but the...

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Fourteen (14) pages, plus appendices with engineering drawings, authored by J. V. McMillin, WLC/MRC Engineering Mgr. The W-400D was an OMR product we developed that could read 30 channels in any of the 80 columns of an IBM tab-card size document, as well as read standard 12-row punched holes in any column. Thus the above key specifications were critical to maintain high accuracy in this combined-mode feature. As an aside, it should be noted - as everyone no doubt knows - that the punched-hole IBM tab-card size document or Hollerith-code format, as it was originally known, is virtually obsolete today as a data-storage medium, but it was Kind of the Hill for several decades until first replaced by magnetic tape in the late 1950's onward, then later by rotating memory (discs), RAM, etc.

Scope and Contents A 25-page Technical Report released by JVM, Product Development Group Manager. One of the early pioneers in optical mark and character reading, Jacob Rabinow, a Russian immigrant, is credited with the axiom, "It's not a question if paper feeding mechanisms will jam, mis-feed, or double-sheet, but if you can live with the incidence. Truer words were never uttered, when it comes to picking, feeding, and stacking paper documents at high speeds (or even low speeds, for that matter!). Our highest speed scanners, the W600 model line, scanned 8.5" x 11" sheets at 36,000/hour, and we ran MRC lab tests on prototype feeding mechanisms at up to 60,000 sheets/hour. A feed jam at this speed can cause serious damage to the offending sheet, and often several others, if the driving mechanism is not stopped quickly. Low humidity factors and/or foreign objects stuck the sheet (staples, candy, sweat, etc.) can cause two sheets to be picked together. Obviously, this condition must be rigorously...

Scope and Contents Background: Incredulous as it may seem today, the gurus at the Westinghouse Learning Corporation (WLC) senior management level believed in the late 1960's that they could use massive technology to completely overhaul the educational system in the United States. A strategy or paradigm known as PLAN, an acronym for Programmed Learning According to Needs, was conceived by WLC - with the aid of nationally renowned and educationally experienced consultants and psychologists (such as B. F. Skinner) - whereby OMR testing technology, based upon a refined version of our MRC W-400D card reader (refer to Item No. 43 above) could be utilized to test each student frequently, and adjust his/her curriculum 'dynamically' as often as the test results dictated. The WLC-modeled PLAN classroom envisioned the students in an open unstructured area, and each student 'doing his/her own thing', based upon where the OMR test results guided them. The classroom teacher was more of an overseer or coach, rather...

Scope and Contents This Technical Report was a sub-set of the ambitious PLAN reader manufacturing project described above. While the official 'go ahead' directive was not issued by WLC Vice President R. W. Marker until August 19, 1969, MRC Engineering, in anticipation of the forthcoming directive, had already begun to 'lead the duck' early in 1969. My 40-page initial report was released in April, with the final specifications for the Burroughs Interface to the MRC card reader completed on September 1, 1969. This document includes a September 8, 1969 trip report, written by a fellow WLC engineer, R. S. Bachtell, from the WEC Pittsburgh, PA facility, and dated September 12, 1969, to the Burroughs Plant in Plymouth, Michigan. I brought four of my WLC/MRC technical staff to the meeting, and we were joined by Bachtell from the WEC Pittsburgh, PA facility, but we were out-gunned by Burroughs, who had representatives present from their Paoli, PA facility and Pittsburgh, PA facility, as well as the Plymouth,...

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This was another example of 'getting ahead of the curve' on the anticipated 'go ahead' for the PLAN reader manufacturing project. This report deals primarily with the liaison between MRC and the reader mechanism provider, and the modifications that MRC Engineering would be making to the standard MDS-6002 mechanism

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This 62-page Technical Report of mine deals with the many difficult design issues, tradeoffs, and alternatives we were facing by the fall of 1968 - prior to the anticipated WLC senior management directive in the fall of 1969 for MRC Engineering to begin manufacturing 150 of the MRC readers

Scope and Contents The DIP (Dual In Line) Integrated circuit 'chips', so common today, were just beginning to replace the earlier TO-5 'transistor' circular package in the 1960's. In today's world, these IC chips are automatically inserted into multi-layer printed circuit boards by robots (such as found on the ubiquitous 'motherboard' of millions of home desktop and laptop computers, as common examples). However, for our low-volume manufacturing of high-speed OMR scanners, MRC Engineering could not afford the expensive tooling required for a very limited-run quantity of printed circuit boards, and therefore, we resorted to 'pluggable wire wrap' motherboards, or backplanes, as we called them. Basically, the idea was to be able to plug the individual DIP modules into rows of connectors whose contacts could be inter-connected with each other on the backplane according to the logic function paths required to implement a given circuit function (signal gates, flip-flops, shift-registers, counters,...

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29-page Report, JVM, author. Introduction (from the Report): "In the past several months, we have developed a number of more or less standard logic interconnections using the Signetics 300 & 600 IC families to implement routine functions in interfaces, encoders, converters, etc. This brief is a summary of these circuits, all of which should find useful application in DIPCHIP systems". JVM Note: refer to Page-50 of the TECH REPORT described in Item No. 49 above, for an illustration of the MRC packaging scheme that was compatible with the PDG-Approved IC Logic families

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An MRC Technical Report covering 26 key parameters in selecting suitable paper stock for printing 'scannable' sheets for high-speed scanning. There can be no success in achieving reliable, fast, and accurate electro-optical scanning of data-bearing documents, unless critical attention is given to the selection of paper stock used to print the documents. This report covers the many variables related to paper stock specifications: size, 'squareness', grain-direction, curl, tear/burst strength, caliper, fiber content, opacity, reflectivity, and others. Industry standards exist for the measurement of these parameters, and MRC honed these standards further to meet our own requirements

Scope and Contents This Technical Brief covers the testing of the DIgitally Controlled Analog Discrimination (DICAD) system developed by MRC Engineering to convert the students' pencil-marked answers on their test sheets (during scanning) into a 4-level digital binary code, defined as High, Medium, Low, or Zero, thus representing an accurate comparison of relative marking levels for separating intended marks from erasures, smudges, and stray marks or doodles. Early MRC hardware designs sampled only one small area, ideally in the center region of the marking 'bubble' or target. In later MRC embodiments of the DICAD scheme, multiple CCD-pixel sample points were taken within the area of the student's marking 'bubble' (e.g., a small circle, oval, or box wherein the student placed his/her answer mark) and each sample was converted into the DICAD code, then 'added' to all the other sample points taken within the bubble. Thus, a wide range of digital codes was generated for computer analysis of each marking...

Scope and Contents The title is possibly misleading, inasmuch this report was released by JVM, Engineering Manager, on JULY 22, 1969. Thus, this 24-page report is yet another example of WLC corporate management's requirement that MRC department managers annually release 'fall' or mid-year reports to cover not only a status of activity and progress to date, but to submit projections of anticipated progress and accomplishments to yearend. This report also includes an 11-page summary of my resume and my ten MRC Engineering & Supervisory staff members - an average age of 33.6 years, and I was 34 at the time. Seasoned, and yet young enough to be creative and energetic in getting tasks and goals fulfilled. Now, nearly four decades later as I write this, at least two of my team members are deceased, and I am an old man. Our key priorities during 1969 were the development of a high-speed student test-booklet slitter (to remove the spines, so that each sheet of the booklet could be scanned separately),...

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An original news clipping about an IBM 360/65 computer being moved into the Lindquist Center over the Christmas holidays on the U of I Campus, including a photo of the main entrance of the new Lindquist Center

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Another original clipping (page 11B); this time from the Gazette which similarly describes the activity during Christmas vacation that an IBM 360/65 computer will be moved into the new Lindquist Center for Measurement. The U of I Computer Center was directed at this time by Professor Gerald P. Weeg. He was the second director of the U of I Computer Center, the first director (as I recall) being Dr. John P. Dolch, who held a Ph.D in music/audio theory

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Related to a lawsuit brought by the City of Iowa City - on behalf of a female job applicant at MRC -against the Measurement Research Center (MRC) division of WLC. The suit was dismissed. Another related clipping about this case - also included in Item No. 55 - is from the Cedar Rapids Gazette newspaper, published a few days later and referring to its own news story where the female applicant's sought position was for a "decollapor" opening. The Gazette follow-up clipping claimed they had checked with MRC and said, "It turns out a decollapor is the operator of a machine that correlates paper. Now is that cleared up?" Well, hardly, they still got it wrong! Decollate: to separate the copies of multiple-copy paper, continuous forms, or computer printout into individual sets or sheets. So, a 'decollator' is the equipment that performs this function, and I suppose a person running this gear could referred to as a decollator operator