A friend of mine was talking about the
console that he used as an undergraduate. It was called the C-Card and used plastic
template "cards" with little slider switches on them. Apparently there were two card readers and you could theoretically do infinite presetting if you had enough cards OR someone resetting the cards during the show.
Does anyone know when this board was produced? Pictures?
Imagine removing the
cover plate of submasters w/the handle and the slider contacts attached under. The card is the plate w/'sub' handles and the corresponding contact sliders underneath. This leaves behind permanently wired into the
console(loosely stated!) the windings that the sliders... Slide along. That's how these worked. Each card was somewhere between 15 and 20 sliders.? It ran 38 dimmers plus
house on it's own permanent slider.
There were multiple cards or plates so you had a pile of them to swap into place. It was a two scene
preset and you faded between two of these sets of cards.
Fade to the B side and change the A card, then
fade to the A side. To change a card you'd
release a gear lever that would
release pressure pressing tge sliders into the windings and free the card for handling. Put another in and
shift to lever to the tight side engaging into place so it would function. Ka-chunk, swap, K-chunk. Half the time it was easier to reset the
preset card in place and not bother to physically swap them. IIRC, it was fine to move channels hot while 'up'.
We had one, sadly no pictures. Sure was a huge steel beast. It was operating a rack of 39 6Kw century dimmers through a classic century
patch panel. Both the rack and the 195
circuit panel live to this day. Of course driven by a modern
console. Those dimmers are tanks. Very reliable w/a few aging issues. Mainly just keep them clean.
The
Strand Archive lists the C Card as being introduced in 1964. I don't think it was made for long. Edkotrons hit at the same time plus they went to the small dial
preset wings like the ten scene (x 50 dimmers)
preset I experienced in school. That one was an Izenour Thyratron Tube
system running 2.5kw and 5.0Kw tube dimmers - 2 tubes each. That was 500 little dials backlit w/
fluorescent tubes. Eyes! Crew set the dials while an op did the crossfading between the ten presets running the show. But I digress!
No luck googling for images of the C Card. DIA in Detroit, MI also had one that was in service into the 80's. They grabbed ours for parts. We
block and tackled it down 25' to get it outta there.
More than ya wanna know? Unloading the memories...