[ToC]

 

Joseph Becker and Robert M. Hayes, Information Storage and Retrieval, John Wiley and Sons, 1963

CRAM HANDLING UNIT

A more recent development, by the National Cash Register Company, is called CRAM (Card Random Access Mechanism) which similarly uses unitized tape for the storage medium, although in this case the card is much larger. Data are recorded on the magnetic card in 56 parallel channels divided into 7 sets of 8 channels, each set being treated as the counterpart of a magnetic tape, with the bits for each individual character recorded in parallel.