None the less, by that time the Bell System was LONG GONE. The telephone system was running under a totally different mold.
I'm surprised such a high volume installation wasn't using a new technology such as the previously mentioned Mohawk Data Systems key-to-disk. Your cards may have been from an old style 'reproducer*' that read gas station charge slips and converted the contents to a punch card (that's why the charge number and amount were in those funny letters). But again I'm not surprised more modern electronic readers weren't in use since they were common by the late 1970s.
(*IBM reproducers also converted the tiny tickets from dept. store clothing purchases into punch cards. They were also used go gang-punch common information into a series of cards, or copy permanent information from a master card into a transaction card.)
I see their name advertised sometimes. They were big into commercial film equipment (ie move projectors, slides, microfilm). I wonder what became of the company now?
At one time many companies used 16 mm sound films as a way to communicate to employees, stockholders, and customers. The largest companies had their own film depts while smaller ones contracted it out. A great many large firms had at least one 16 mm sound projector available to show training or otherwise films. There were somewhat portable models corporate spokesmen would take around to social clubs and organizations and show a film showing the company.
Today these films are extremely valuable historically. They show attitudes and trends of business. Sadly, I suspect a great many are being destroyed as companies merge or fold.
Some films from the Bell System (which made a great many) are available on VHS from collectors.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: My grandfather got me on at Standard Oil in the credit card office in Chicago in June, 1967, _not_ in 1978! His boss had gotten me the phone room job at University of Chicago when I was in high school in 1959; grandpa was with the company as an executive at Whiting Refinery for several years, but did not think I should be doing refinery work. You see, I am not really all that good at doing hard labor jobs. Grandpa's boss was going to put me to work in the superintendent's office either in Whiting or maybe send me back to Neodesha, KS (where grandfather had worked at one time); I thought I should stay around Chicago where my friends were so he suggested the marketing department or credit card processing office would be good for me.In the credit card processing office in 1967 they had IBM 370 computers but also relied heavily on a combination of optical scanning and key punching and manual verification. That's when we had those women with their 'shopping carts' full of metal trays which in turn were full of cards. The tray-full of cards was considered a 'batch'. No desktop terminals in sight anywhere. After we had corrected mistakes found in the batches all the cards were taken to an IBM 'gang-punch' machine where they were stacked up thousands at a time, and run through a machine which could read them and punch them. The cards fell out in two pockets. One pocket was the correctly punched cards; what fell in the other pockets were rejects, and you had to put this stack in a second time in the hopes _that time_ they would get punched correctly.
Some cards just never would punch for some reason. There were other cards which got mangled up or mutilated by the gang punch machine, and these had be handled specially/ I had to use a rubber stamp and stamp the letters 'NMU' on the card (these were all gas station customer invoices.) Then I had to take a fresh, crisp blank card, which was entitled 'substitute for invoice', fill in all the details by hand and run that one through the gang-punch instead, along with another 'control punch' in one of the columns which meant it was intended to replace the NMU (or Non Machine Usable) card. That special punch caused the card to fall out of the stack when the customer bills were sent out (about seven hundred thousand customers were billed each day,
22 days per month), and when that one fell out, that customer's tickets were taken to someone who kept the mangled card in a pile on her desk, and the substitute was swapped out for the mangled card which was actually sent out, at the end of the line.In 1970 I guess, I do not remember for sure, they brought around terminals, sat them on the desks and told people 'Do not Touch These' until we explain what to do, which was about a month later. We were told these would be replacing some of the job functions that had been done manually before. PAT]