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Inforex Inc. corporation manufactured and sold key-to-disk systems in the 1970s and mid-1980s. The company was founded by ex-IBM engineers to develop direct data entry systems that allowed information to be entered on terminals and stored directly on disk drives, replacing punched cards and keypunch machines which had been the dominant tools for data entry since the turn of the twentieth century. == Background Information == Key-to-disk systems were systems that took data entered by users from keypunch-like keyboards and held the information on a hard disk. The information was then transferred from disk to 1/2 inch tape for processing on the user's mainframe equipment. At the time data gathering in large scale for processing on a mainframe computer was a labor intensive expensive endeavor. For example a typical sales order might go through the following steps: 1) Order written on contract, collected by the salesman. 2) Order transferred to paper order sheet (unusually with multiple carbon copies) transcribed by the salesman or a secretary. 3) Order sheet, after verification and approval passed to the Data Center for entry into the computer system for processing. 4) Order sheet, transferred to by a keypunch operator to a card or multiple cards for processing. 5) Order card(s), verified by a second keypunch operator (by essentially punching the card a second time) to verify accuracy. 6) Order card read by computer. 7) Parts ordered, equipment purchased. The same tried and practiced methods were used to bill the customer, record customer payments, and pay outgoing expenses. The advantage of key-to-disk systems over card punches was the ability to see the entire content of an 80 byte card on a monitor to edit and correct mistakes. A major and unique advantage of the Inforex Key-to-Disk-to-Tape system allowed an operator to directly read, edit, and write back, any single tape record directly onto the original 9 track output tape, in that tape records' original position in the tape. This capacity would allow for quick corrections to minor keying errors. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Inforex 1300 Systems」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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