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@Symptoms - All NI cards were delivered from the benefit offices to Longbenton where they were sorted and delivered to the 100 NI sections. The number of NI Stamps, or Credits, for each year, on a workers NI card were entered clerically onto each workers NI Record Sheet by the Clerical Officers (CO's) in the 100 NI sections on the Longbenton site. So the NI clerical records for 1948 to 1970 were added to the first NI Recording System = ICL 1906A mainframes by 'Punch Card' operators.The Punch Card sections recieved the clerical record sheets and typed the data from the Record Sheets into the Punch Card machine and a Punch Card was output. All the Punch Cards were 'Batched' and sent to the Mainframe where to cards were fed into a Punch Card Reader that read the data and and the data was written to Magnetic Tapes (MTs) and the MTs were read into various data validation programs and then written to the relevant persons NI record that was held on MTs = either 2 or 3 reels of 6260bps, 2400 foot of MT for each NI section. And the NI Main File (MF) was created. Following that massive exercise the yearly NI contributions paid were delivered to the National Insurance Recording System (NIRS) on every type of media that an employer used = MTs (9 Track or 7 Track) - computer Discs (Amstrad - ICL - IBM etc. etc) or paper. There was an Input Program that read all formats of MTs. Anything that wasn't sent in on MT's was converted by the Punch Card Sections to MTs. The Input program that read all the records coming into the system was named FORTAP = FOReign TAPe and it passed the converted data onto a set of additional input programs that would sort all the records into NI order to be passed forward to be added to the MF records held on the 2 to 3 hundred MT reels.