Unit Record Equipment - Sorting

Sorting

See also: IBM 80 series Card Sorters and IBM 101 Statistical Sorting Machine

An activity in many unit record shops was sorting decks of punched cards into the order necessary for the next processing step. Sorters, like the IBM 80 series Card Sorters, sorted input cards into one of 13 pockets depending on the holes punched in a selected column and the sorter's settings. The 13th pocket was for blanks and rejects. Sorting an input deck into ascending sequence on a multiple column field, such as an employee number, was done by a radix sort, bucket sort, or a combination of the two methods.