Despite a painful familiarity with filling out Scantron forms, I’ve never seen the machine they were fed into. This video shows how they work, how the answers were programmed, and dives into its internals.
If you just want to see the guts of it, skip to about 14:30
That brings back memories. Our science teacher still used this because he said the school bought a shitload of forma and then they went out of faahion, so he was trying to work through a tock room of thousands of these
Probably a pretty common scenario, I’d guess. Apparently Scantron had an interesting business model where they basically rented the machines to the schools for free as long as they bought certain amounts of the official Scantron forms.