I explored this a bit last year in a project for converting small snippets of RPG, COBOL, and FORTRAN to a punch card like format in https://github.com/barretto

I explored this a bit last year in a project for converting small snippets of RPG, COBOL, and FORTRAN to a punch card like format in https://github.com/barrettotte/punchit https://github.com/barrettotte/punchit https://www.masswerk.at/keypunch/ https://www.masswerk.at/keypunch/ is a good tool for getting the basics of the punch card encoding scheme. There's also a handful of people over at Hackaday that have made hardware for reading punch cards. Example: https://hackaday.com/2015/01/17/arduino-reads-punch-cards/ https://hackaday.com/2015/01/17/arduino-reads-punch-cards/