Chapter 1938 - Punching Machine

Feng Nuo was currently on the BBS reading a post: "If there were another wormhole, would you go back?"

This was a perennial thread on the BBS, but over the years, not only were fewer people visiting the BBS and less frequently, but replies to this thread were also dwindling. A new reply wouldn't appear for ten days or half a month. Of course, this also related to the BBS's overall cooling. Senators' enthusiasm for the BBS had dropped significantly. Let alone bumping threads, very few even started new ones.

The grand occasion of the past where a "Senatorial Power" thread could build thousands of floors was gone. Firstly, Senators were busy with affairs and had no time to bicker on the BBS. Secondly, everyone's titles were getting bigger and their power heavier, so spouting off on the BBS would inevitably be "beneath their dignity." Consequently, proposals, memos, circulars—these official documents with various titles replaced online discussions.

Because Feng Nuo managed the server room and concurrently served as a BBS administrator, he had to check in periodically, maintaining the forum database. He'd also check if there were new replies under this thread, but he never spoke up on it. Actually, until a few months ago, he felt his answer was still "Yes." But he would never say it aloud—others' replies might just be idle chatter or venting dissatisfaction, but he absolutely could not show the slightest "wavering of revolutionary will."

Staring at the BBS in a daze for a while, pondering what answer he would give now. For the first time in months, he felt his connection to the world. Networking, meetings, looking up materials all night, reviewing university textbooks he'd 90% forgotten just to be able to interject a sentence or two when discussing design proposals with mechanical department Senators—this was a sense of fulfillment he hadn't experienced even in the old timeline.

"So this is how those red-faced guys feel!"

A grumbling sound from his stomach interrupted his thoughts. He turned his gaze to the materials on the desk. As the computer project deepened, his desk became increasingly messy, piled with documents pouring in from all sides.

Just reading through them all made Feng Nuo feel exhausted—there were too many places needing coordination. He now fully understood why his supervisor was "not attending to proper duties" all day long.

Pity he didn't have any graduate students at his disposal...

The first report was a trial report on the punching machine. The punching machine had been in use for several weeks, and currently, pilot work for the population census was being carried out in Lingao and Qiongshan, where grassroots conditions were relatively good.

The census results naturally could not be preserved solely on punched cards whose reliability remained unproven. In fact, it still took the form of census takers entering households to fill out the "Permanent Population Registration Form." The census results of each sub-district or commune were then uniformly "card-ized." Though the punching machine had insufficient material strength, a high damage rate, poor card quality, and the naturalized staff had short training times—leading to a waste card rate exceeding 50% in practice at one point—the entire census work had been basically completed. To cooperate with subsequent tabulating machine development, several sub-districts' "Permanent Population Registration Forms" and statistical results were transferred to facilitate proofreading and verification. All materials were moved from the Ministry of Civil Affairs and temporarily piled in a warehouse at the General Machinery Plant.

The card feeding and transmission system seemed to have finished development. Under manually controlled laboratory conditions, the current card feeding and transmission system could complete a series of processes: reading cards one by one, feeding them at uniform speed to the processing unit, stopping to accept processing, and sending out processed cards. Limited by card quality, however, transmission speed remained very slow, and paper jams occurred occasionally. This system was the common basic system for subsequent tabulator, sorter, and reproduction punch development. The so-called sorter drove different card output mechanisms to send cards to different card pockets based on punched information read in series-connected multiple processing units. The so-called reproduction punch consisted of two sets of transmission-processing systems, where one processing unit was responsible for reading punched cards' information, and the other unit punched holes in the same positions for new cards. The tabulator/accounting machine, on the other hand, performed basic statistics after card reading by the processing unit and relied on programmable plugboards or even control cards to perform digit-character conversion operations.

This part had little to do with the power source; it was more about mechanical structure design and development. If an electric method was adopted, transmission stability would be stronger, and card feeding accuracy would also be higher. Of course, electricity was also the prerequisite for automatic control based on punched cards using relays. Designing an electromechanical control system was much simpler than a purely mechanical control system. Feng Nuo himself could barely handle it, whereas purely mechanical control design would probably require asking someone else for help, which Feng Nuo was unwilling to do.

The tackling group's next plan was tabulator development. The tabulator was roughly divided into two functional parts: one was data statistics and calculation, and the other was the output structure. Data statistics and calculation went without saying; the word "calculation" in mechanical computer fell on this, and it was a subject that had to be conquered. The output structure involved another massive project: the Chinese typewriter system. The mechanical department had previously imitated a Chinese typewriter, but the result was only marginally better than that hand-cranked calculator project, basically considered usable. Moreover, because typing efficiency and the problem of memorizing the character table couldn't be solved, the Chinese typewriter in the old timeline was never considered popular. Except for necessary formal documents and printed matter like books and newspapers, it wasn't more convenient than handwritten mimeographing in ordinary occasions, and far from comparable to English typewriters.

However, an automatic typewriter system was still very tempting. Not only would it save the difficulty of manually memorizing the character table, but if the automatic control system passed muster, character picking efficiency would also be greatly improved. Feng Nuo even utilized his free time managing the Computing Center to re-optimize the character tray layout. The Chinese encoding scheme passed some time ago was the section-position code arranged by Pinyin. The lead types in the Chinese typewriter's character tray were mainly classified by radicals—these were all arrangements adopted to facilitate human memory. But an automatic typewriter didn't have this necessity; it only needed to arrange lead types with the goal of "minimizing the expected value of the average moving distance of the machine body during the character fetching process." Therefore, Feng Nuo calculated the transition probability between commonly used characters based on the massive corpus extracted from the Data Center, constructed a huge Markov model, and solved it in the Computing Center intermittently for two or three months before coming up with an optimized character tray scheme. Feng Nuo estimated this scheme was 30% to 50% more efficient than the character tray used in the old timeline. Of course, manual character picking became completely impossible.

Feng Nuo excitedly took the plan to the Chinese typewriter project team to pitch his idea and request cooperation, but was soon doused with cold water. The Chinese typewriter project team was a group of mechanical department Senators who had no intention of electrifying or automating the Chinese typewriter either now or in the foreseeable future. These people were quite generous in introducing abundant relevant information and experience to him, even taking him to visit models and prototypes. However, Feng Nuo's scheme had to rely on a complex wiring structure to transform the section-position code into character tray coordinates, then calculate the machine body's moving distance based on current coordinates, and precisely drive the motor to run to achieve the goal. Though Feng Nuo didn't understand electromechanics, he knew this thing wasn't in a position on the tech tree reachable within these few years.

After this setback, regarding the Chinese output mechanism, the tackling group organized several more discussions and finally concluded that the difficulty was too great, deciding to suspend development and focus mainly on the card information statistics function. At most, simply develop an automatic number printing function as the output mechanism.

The card statistical function could be divided into two schemes. One was to make several accumulators based on electromagnetic storage mechanisms' advantages over purely mechanical storage mechanisms; the second was to follow hand-cranked calculators' mechanical storage mechanism, with relays only used for automatic control. More complex calculations would be completed through the combination of multiple sorters/accounting machines.

Feng Nuo naturally favored the first scheme in his heart, but it was hard to ignore the advantage of mechanical storage being simpler to realize at the current stage. However, regardless of which scheme, the electromagnetic control system was unavoidable. The tackling group Senators each had their own affairs. Though professionally speaking, Faraday and others were more suitable for relay development than him, getting a few people together for a meeting to brainstorm was fine, but asking them to act as the main force for tackling the problem was impossible due to lack of time. The electrical department Senators were currently bent on engaging in strong current systems like generators and motors; relays were temporarily not on the schedule. If Feng Nuo wanted to quickly push this project forward, he had to go down to the field and tackle this technical difficulty himself.

A restrained knock sounded on the office door.

"Come in."

Feng Nuo noticed Feng Shan walking in. Her eyes had dark circles. He asked, "Added classes again this morning?"

He remembered there were no classes scheduled at Fangcaodi this morning.

"Temporarily added classes," Feng Shan said.

This kind of thing was common; Fangcaodi's class scheduling was of the Big Four accounting firms type. But a trace of suspicion rose in Feng Nuo's heart; he felt Feng Shan seemed to be hiding something. This thought passed in a flash. Because he suddenly noticed that his maid was wearing the uniform distributed by the General Office for Living Secretaries today, commonly known as the "maid uniform." Because of substituting classes at Fangcaodi, Feng Shan almost never wore the "maid uniform." Why did she think of wearing this today?

Unlike many maids who liked wearing this uniform to show off their "distinctive" status, Feng Shan didn't like wearing the maid uniform, even resisting it somewhat. Feng Nuo generally didn't force her—wear whatever she liked, he wasn't a maid fetishist.

The reason shouldn't be that too many dirty clothes had accumulated and there was nothing to change into—the Service Agency had laundry services. Feng Nuo was very considerate of Feng Shan's busyness and hardship; many rough and heavy chores were outsourced to the Service Agency.

But he didn't have time to delve deeper: "Find time to clean up the house sanitation. I've been very busy recently and can't attend to it at all."

(End of Chapter)