[bergy]

Probably been posted before & not new to the SYC community, but in 1969 the orders were received at Central Office and had to be key punched onto cards that were then fed into the card reader at the computer station. Since many of the larger dealers sent their orders in to Central office in batches, these batches would be key punched together and wind up in order in the same stack of cards that was fed into the computer. The computer feed order of the punch cards resulted in assignment of sequential body numbers. Dealers that placed large stock orders would subsequently "release" smaller batches of the large order for production.
Just as an aside - if you knew the right employee at Central Office, you could get your car "moved up" in production release sequence. In 1975, as a Senior Engineer at Chevrolet R&D, I had my Corvette built & shipped to the dealer so fast that it had to sit on the dealer's lot waiting for the paperwork to catch up to it. That was a GM salary employee order & delivered to the dealer just down the road from the Tech center. Back then, the salary employee discount was a lot better deal then today - 18% off of the base sticker plus 20+% off of options (varied with option). If you didn't mind a few miles on your car, you could have an exec drive it 3,000 miles (company car) and get an additional 10% off (plus another 5% if it was "last round" - end of model year). We could buy a new Corvette every year - balloon finance 100% through GMAC - and sell it after owning it 12 months. Most of the time the out of pocket was $0.00.