I got a call the other day from a gentleman who had some Ford truck info and other stuff that was related to our club. This HUGE manual was part of the stash...it appears to have been printed in 1976 from microfiche (the microfiche is on the IBM cards in the photo). The whole stack of microfiche cards sold for $9.50 in 1976. The pages measure 14x18 inches...no cheaters needed to read these pages! I placed the Parts and Accessories Manual in the pic just to show how the sizes compare. Just one of those weird things that I thought I would share...

 

Thanks for sharing. I think it's funny you have to explain what microfiche is. That was hi tech when I was younger. Some of the younger members may not know what it is.

 

Ill take two, please!

 

My company has made reader/printers for microfische for years. I've never worked on them, but there are places that still use fische. They are becoming few and far between now. Libraries used to have them but I think most have gone away. (I haven't been to the library in decades)

 

The library fiches also seemed to print out on the crappiest paper imaginable, that looks like good stuff.

 

Explain what microfiche is? Heck the young ones never heard of IBM Cards, did they?

 

The cards are really HOLLARITH cards - everyone calls them IBM because everyone though that was the only computer company around. Hollarith was the guy that came up with the code. top 3 rows were the 12,11,10 rows then 1-9 so a 12-1 punch was an A, 12-2 was a B and down thru the alphabet and special characters. My dad worked for Kiplinger's Changing Times magazine & newsletter when I was a kid of 9-10 yrs old and we use to run the sorters for him on saturdays When we finished we got to use the 2 bowling lanes and pool tables in the employees lounge. That's when companies cared about happy employees.

 

My summer job in '71 included taking a hand-cart loaded with trays of those cards (all sorted), something like 10,000 of them, from our office in downtown Chicago (Loop), about 5 blocks away to a company that "read" them and sent a tape of the input to McDonnell-Douglas in St. Louis. A week later we'd get the results on that green-and-white edge-punched paper.

One day one of the other guys was taking a load over there, and tipped the handcart over into a puddle of water, scattered cards all over. Boss was NOT pleased...

Today all that would be done on a laptop or PC, all the data would fit on a thumb drive many times over.

 

The cards and the green and white edged paper were a fixture around our house. Heck, one year dad made a Christmas wreath out of the punchcards.

Bobby

 

I had a computer room that was 75 x 50 with 20 tons of A/C and wall to wall machines. My current laptop holds 20 x the data and is way faster plus I don't spend 4K a month on electricity. Who says they were the good old days. Except for our wonderful fat fenders of course

 

Phone systems were like computer systems, San Francisco city Halls phone switch took up 1/2 city block and was replaced with a box in a closet. Heck my home phone needed a battery last week, and when I put in an old rotary dial phone while I went to get a battery, my wife didn't know how to use it. LOL At least in those days,most jobs came with benefits and retirement.

 

Back in 1972 my boss comes at me and says give me a hand here please. He hands me a shoe box full of those computor cards and says "I need the information of these". Apparently he was too cheap to send them out of office. I could never figure out what the heck he was looking for off them, so I set them aside and whenever he came around I would say I'm still working on it. They were still in the closet 36 years later when I retired.

 

I am reading the posts on this thread and wondering...is it just me or does someone else see the irony in the discussions about the antiquated technology used in this media yet missed the point that the technology was employed 20 years AFTER these trucks were built! Do you think that there are people out there who are just as passionate about the old technology as we are about the old trucks?

 

I have a micro fich reader in the basement just in case I ever get something to read ..and the real to real (?) tape player next to it still works ,,,just wondering ..a little off topic ..but would an 8-track player in my 54 be period correct ??? or just silly ?

 

This is the original loose leaf paper shop manual, when Ford sent the dealers new pages, it was EZ to insert them.

It was huge cuz it was easier to read while mechanics laid them on fenders/workbenches. 8" x 11" shop manuals available on bound paper, but only reflected the year a new model was introduced. Supplements were added for following years until the model changed, then the whole process was repeated.

faxonautolit.com has 100's of both types of these manuals. Faxon located in Riverside CA, open Monday thru Saturday.

Shop manual may have also been available on microfiche, but I've never seen any service literature on microfiche.

Parts catalogs on microfiche introduced in 1967, FoMoCo sent the dealers all the slides and a HUGE viewer that wasn't worth a damn. Every time you moved the slide to another page, the viewer had to be refocused. Parts manager at Ralph Williams Ford, where I was working at this time, was so disgusted, he threw the viewer into the dipsy dumpster!

It wasn't until the mid 1980's that FoMoCo introduced a viewer that actually worked, the resolution was also much better.

I have 2 of these viewers and most of my 1973/2001 parts catalogs are on microfiche (see album for picture of viewer atop kidney shaped desk).

Because it's easier to post pics from CD's, than use 'magic wand' scanner on paper and microfiche catalogs, I recently bought CD's of 1948/56, 1957/63, 1973/79, 1980/89 truck catalogs.

1948/56 Ford Truck Parts Catalog available on a CD from hipoparts.com. Reprinted bound paper catalogs (Volume I Text & Volume II Illustrations) available from Carpenter for $250.00.

CD catalog includes Volume 1 & 2: