To clarify how punch cards worked: most of the characters in BCDIC/EBCDIC had one or two holes per column, but some had three. E.g. $ had three punches 11-8-3.

To clarify how punch cards worked: most of the characters in BCDIC/EBCDIC had one or two holes per column, but some had three. E.g. $ had three punches 11-8-3. In addition, you could use "column binary", where each column had arbitrary punches to hold 12 bits of data. Regarding the parent comment, there's no reason you'd display the hole pattern for two cards on an 80x24 display. The point is you'd use 80-column displays so each line represents the contents of a card.