I just ran across this thread, and thought I'd correct/confirm a couple of things. I spent the first part of my IBM career on the development team that designed the 3890 and 3895, so I am familiar with those machines. First, the 3895 was NOT a printer. It was a specialized kind of check sorter. Specifically, it was called a "document reader/inscriber", and it read and sorted checks, but with a very important added feature. The 3895 was able to find and read the handwritten amount on a check, then inscribe that amount on the MICR codeline - thus saving a great deal of time over the traditional method where a bunch of operators read the checks with their eyes and type in the amounts on an inscribing machine. I did a lot of work on the OCR that did that recognition - fun stuff. As I recall, the goal was to get it right on at least 50% of the checks, and sort the others out so they could be handled in the traditional way. In addition to these features, the 3895 read the existing MICR codeline data and could print an item number and a bank endorsement on each check. You can see a photo of the machine and a little other information here: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/brochures/IBM3895DocumentReaderInsciber.pdf
Secondly, I can confirm that the 3890 sorter used a 360 mod 25 as the internal control unit. This was the case until 1988 (I think), when the 360 was replaced with PC technology. It was quite an interesting process - the team tried for many years to find a replacement for the 360 mod 25, but nothing had fast enough response time to do that until around 1988. That old mod 25 did an amazing job. If I recall correctly, it was programmed directly in its native microcode language, and not in the 360 instruction set. (I should remember for sure, since I wrote some code that ran on that processor, but it was just too long ago...) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
