Here is his own story, in his own words:
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In the second
half of the last century, many European countries introduced national or
regional lotteries in order to raise funds to benefit good causes and
charities.
Coupons were
available to buy by the general public at agent locations such as tobacconists,
newsagents and other local stores. Each coupon had a unique machine-readable (magnetic
or optical fonts) serial number in a range of layouts depending on the games
offered by the lottery operator – could be simple games of chance e.g.
selecting 5 numbers out of 45, 6 numbers out of 49 etc. or based on skill and
knowledge such as predicting the results of soccer matches.
All of the
completed lottery coupons were returned to each lottery organisation’s central
processing centre by the selling agents on a weekly basis. At the centre the coupons
were microfilmed for security before passing through high speed document reader
/ sorters (up to 30 coupons per second / 108,000 per hour) in order to capture
the betting mark and serial number data of all the punters’ coupons, which was
then written to magnetic tapes.
Any coupons
with read errors, such as not enough or too many marks, missing or invalid (e.g.
failed check sum) serial numbers, were physically segregated by the reader /
sorter equipment.
The Nixdorf 620
Key to Disc systems were used for a range of processes but mainly to access the
rejected coupon data records from the magnetic tapes, load them to disc to
facilitate the manual correction / verification of the data by operators
visually checking each rejected coupon.
The corrected
data records were then merged with the previously correctly read data to
produce a master record of all coupons entering the pool that week. After the
drawing of the lucky balls for a straight lottery or the completion of the
soccer matches, the master record was then processed to produce winners lists
for the different classes of win and the printing of payout cheques to be sent
to the winners.
In the early 1970’s,
I was involved with the installation and commissioning of the reader / sorter
equipment and the Nixdorf 620 systems at the French lottery’s new computer
centre situated in the grounds of a chateau not far from Paris Charles de
Gaulle Airport. This lottery was originally setup to support French war injured
soldiers but subsequently became the French national lottery. Its data
processing operations were modeled on those of the highly successful Nordwestlotto,
based in the German state of Nordrhein-Westfalen.
Although I was
never directly involved with the German equipment, they also used Nixdorf 620’s
(and later 8870/6’s) for reject coupon correction / verification.
At around the
same time, the Massachusetts State Lottery introduced similar machine-readable
coupons and high speed reader / sorters. They would also have had a need for
reject coupon processing. Maybe they used the Entrex system???
The below images provide some visual reference to the above text.
Click each to enlarge, or click the "see maximum size" hyperlink below each image
620 installation at French lottery – 2 of the 3 main system racks and
printers
620 installation at French lottery – 2 of the 3 main system racks and
printers
620 installation at French lottery – data entry terminals, 3 sets of 12 (?)
Nordwestlotto 620 dataflow
showing Nordwestlotto coupon samples
I apologise for the poor quality of the
JPGs but I took the photos back in the day when I processed my own black and
white 35mm films.
Brian Parkinson - March 2019
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Below is the summary of my email conversation with Brian about this. There is a bit of repetition here, but worth reading, as he shares some additional details not in his narrative above.
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Back in the 1970s I worked for a company that supplied high speed document reading systems to the French national lottery.
The Nixdorf kit was used to manually edit tape / disc records for the paper lottery coupons that were not readable by the high speed reader / sorter equipments.
I was responsible for installing and commissioning all the kit in the new processing centre not far from Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris.
continued on 2019-02-27:
To be honest, I can't get my head around why someone would want to keep such a system running - it seemed so mundane at the time, key-to-disc is not exactly a "sexy" application. But it is a part of our computing heritage, so I wish you the best of luck.
...it was a one-off project and I didn't have any formal training on the system. From what I remember all 3 of the systems went in without any hardware issues that I recall, apart from the cabling to the data entry consoles. There were some glitches with the software application but they were the programmers' responsibility ;)
Continued on 2019-03-11:
The photos are of the actual equipment that had just been installed at the French lottery's new processing centre. One of the systems had previously been set-up in our factory to allow the application software engineers to do their thing. Later, this then joined the other two at site prior to "go live".
I was involved with the installation and commissioning of the three 620s and the high speed reader / sorter equipments (I think there were 6 of those) that were a mainstay product of the company that I worked for over a 12 year period between 1974 and 1986.
As I'd indicated previously, from what I can remember the installation and commissioning of 620s went quite smoothly with only a few cabling issues associated with the data entry terminals. So I didn't have any need to get deeply involved with their inner workings.
In contrast, my experience on the reader / sorter systems was much more involved as it was a core product of the company and I was dealing with them on a daily basis. Work on those ranged from in-house build / configuration / testing / installation / commissioning / servicing of the document transports and the optical / magnetic sensors that scanned the documents, along with the Honeywell H316 minicomputers / punched paper tape readers / magnetic tape drives / printers etc. that controlled the transports and did first level processing of the data captured off the lottery coupons.
Cheers
Brian
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The Nixdorf kit was used to manually edit tape / disc records for the paper lottery coupons that were not readable by the high speed reader / sorter equipments.
I was responsible for installing and commissioning all the kit in the new processing centre not far from Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris.
continued on 2019-02-27:
To be honest, I can't get my head around why someone would want to keep such a system running - it seemed so mundane at the time, key-to-disc is not exactly a "sexy" application. But it is a part of our computing heritage, so I wish you the best of luck.
...it was a one-off project and I didn't have any formal training on the system. From what I remember all 3 of the systems went in without any hardware issues that I recall, apart from the cabling to the data entry consoles. There were some glitches with the software application but they were the programmers' responsibility ;)
Continued on 2019-03-11:
The photos are of the actual equipment that had just been installed at the French lottery's new processing centre. One of the systems had previously been set-up in our factory to allow the application software engineers to do their thing. Later, this then joined the other two at site prior to "go live".
I was involved with the installation and commissioning of the three 620s and the high speed reader / sorter equipments (I think there were 6 of those) that were a mainstay product of the company that I worked for over a 12 year period between 1974 and 1986.
As I'd indicated previously, from what I can remember the installation and commissioning of 620s went quite smoothly with only a few cabling issues associated with the data entry terminals. So I didn't have any need to get deeply involved with their inner workings.
In contrast, my experience on the reader / sorter systems was much more involved as it was a core product of the company and I was dealing with them on a daily basis. Work on those ranged from in-house build / configuration / testing / installation / commissioning / servicing of the document transports and the optical / magnetic sensors that scanned the documents, along with the Honeywell H316 minicomputers / punched paper tape readers / magnetic tape drives / printers etc. that controlled the transports and did first level processing of the data captured off the lottery coupons.
Cheers
Brian
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10/25/2020 Update: We found a color picture from this lottery coupon processing center in the Nixdorf [German] "1979 annual report" publication (Geschäftsbericht 1979).
All provided to us courtesy of Heinrich Stummer of Saintsummers Projects:
The caption by the pictures reads:
Die staatliche franzosische Lotto- und Toto-Gesellschaft in Paris erfaßt Woche fur Woche große Mengen von Belegen auf Datensammelsystemen 620 von Nixdorf (Bild oben). - Buchhaltung und Patentverwaltung sind die wesentlichen Einsatzgebiete der Magnetplattenanlage 8870, die das Pattenanwaltsburo Societe Germain & Maureau in Lyon installiert hat.
Week after week, the French state lottery company in Paris collects large quantities of receipts on Nixdorf's 620 data collection system (top picture). - Accounting and patent administration are the main areas of application for the 8870 magnetic disk system installed by the patent attorney office Societe Germain & Maureau in Lyon.
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