The seller of these fantastic service manuals has provided his history working with these systems. We are all thankful that he remembers this, saved these images, and especially, the service manuals...thank you Brian!
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
