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Topic: The British Hit Singles Jan 1940 - Oct 1952: The Missing Charts

23rd Apr 2024, 8:03 PM
	Pridesale Member since Mar 2013 805 Points	Mike -see the regular "magazine" "Pop Singles" Copyright © by Christopher Foss Printed in England from punched-cards by Eyre and Spottiswoode Limited at Grosvenor Press Portsmouth The Punched Cards would hold the standing data - Label, Cat Number, Artist Name , Track Names (not for that book the writers/composers/publishers). As well as some for Companies that pressed records and their contact addresses ( industrial trade directory publishing was done similariar) New Cards would be created for new issues, and records deleted by labels would be removed from the print run stack ( poss destroyed, poss set aside ). The cards would be read - either by light , or by physical wires, and the resultant letter ( or effectively a form of ASCII Code ) sent to a "word store" this could then either be printed by a chain printer line by line or various typesetting systems (effectively the cards derived either from Jaquard Loom Cards - which gave serial instructions to a number of lines of weaving or knitting ) and/or the IBM "80 colum" cards invented for the US Census by IBM. Hollerith was a specific company mainly running a tabulating (or counting) system , so requests for orders could be counted out from the cards so punched - record store name etc from standing information, record detail from the cat number then order quantity per record. run the tabulation program and you get the order per store - added up for total discs (and thus package weight and volume and orders for pressing if not in stock), and you get a weekly total of orders per disc for all stores. it basically part automates the manual "gate and bar" method of counting. ( from the cards things like invoicing, purchase tax returns , delivery notes could be made - alternative would be a local distributor hand writing - sometimes in duplicate books (inc "Kalamazoo" or similar carbon copy sheets) sales details , this tended to happen in smaller labels which by 1940 had just about disappeared.