5 ms·

Cardpunch: Punch a punched card

68 points by susam 4y ago

ktpsns 4y ago
There are various card puncher emulators in the web. I recently stumbled upon https://masswerk.at/keypunch/ https://masswerk.at/keypunch/ which is very nice. In the old days, when X11 was cool, we had https://cyber.dabamos.de/unix/x11/#x026 https://cyber.dabamos.de/unix/x11/#x026
- masswerk 4y ago
  As the author of one of the pages you mentioned (thanks for that!), I want to point out that the one at kloth.net is much like the original one on the Web. (There may have been earlier ones, but of those that are still around…)
jat850 4y ago
My father worked in early IT days and a major fixture in my home growing up was boxes - and I mean dozens and dozens of boxes filled with thousands each - of punch cards they stopped using (all unpunched). They made for fantastic quick note-taking, grocery-list making, or leaving notes for the family. This is a super fun site from a pure nostalgia perspective.
- ggm 4y ago
  I still have almost a gross of these. I don't miss chad.
ghewgill 4y ago
My dad was a math professor (he was really a computer nerd, but there was no "computer nerd" course of study back then). Down the hall from his office there was a room with a variety of toys in it, including an IBM 029 [1] which was great fun for me to play with as a kid. (It was noisy and you could make your very own cards you could keep!) Although the card punch was still operational, nobody really used it at that point since interactive terminals had taken over. The computing center had a seemingly infinite supply of cards, and many of them made their way home. My mom to this day (over 40 years later) still uses punch cards as note paper. Good memories. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keypunch#IBM_029_Card_Punch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keypunch#IBM_029_Card_Punch
- toast0 4y ago
  > My mom to this day (over 40 years later) still uses punch cards as note paper. Good memories. My mom ran out of punch card note pages, sadly. They're a real nice size for taking notes.
- danielodievich 4y ago
  My educated grandma was a physicist in USSR who coded on punch cards who brought home her programs for note taking. I've taken so many notes on those, learning how to write around the holes. Weirdly enough I found one of her cards in some box that we brought here to USA and gave it to my wife, she has it in her art supplies. That thing is like 70 years old, and I love looking at it!
- mgdlbp 4y ago
  > IBM 029 demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnnGbcM-H8c&list=PL-_93BVApb59yIG2RELONEYOzJ3lMXsqV&index=10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnnGbcM-H8c&list=PL-_93BVApb... 1968 instructional video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fVRGQT1CoM&t=21s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fVRGQT1CoM&t=21s
- dmd 4y ago
  My wife (digital archivist at the MIT Museum) and I sent out our wedding invitations on punched cards.
- davelondon 4y ago
  Same! If you wanted a piece of scrap paper in my house (Dad worked at IBM), a fresh box of used punch cards was never far away.
molbioguy 4y ago
Working with the real thing, I remember the horrible feeling when the rubber band holding the card deck together snaps! The FORTRAN cards all had line numbers, but what a pain for a several hundred line program.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  I heard it mentioned by an old timer that some programmers in those days used to draw a diagonal line with marker across the side of the stack of cards. This was to make sorting the cards faster if the stack was dropped.
  - molbioguy 4y ago
    Yes, that helped you. But you still had to put them back in order :( Visual sorting O(n).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
peter_d_sherman 4y ago
You know, punched card decks used to store data -- very small amounts of data, at least relative to tapes -- which in turn stored very small amounts of data relative to disk drives, etc., etc. On that note, if one wanted to make an improvised data storage device, for storing very small amounts of data (for let's say, a future Zombie Apocalypse, or what-have-you!) -- then what about using a Printer/OCR combo -- to store small amounts of data (relatively speaking!) -- as graphical designs, dot graphs, similar to punch cards, in effect, on pieces of ordinary printer paper? Oh sure, it wouldn't store Gigabytes of information, or even Megabytes or Killobytes -- but you could probably fit some early historical computer programs onto standard printer paper -- just printed as dot patterns! Which leads to another interesting question! Given a Printer of X DPI printing capacity, and an OCR of Y DPI scanning capacity: a) What algorithm or algorithms should be used to put the maximum amount of information that can be reliably scanned (100% accuracy every time!) back onto the the page? b) What encoding method should be used? c) What checksumming/CRC/hash/error correcting method should be used to insure 100% accuracy? d) Are there any other potential snags or gotchas, such as the inability to print and/or scan on a specific part of a page and/or issues with inks fading over time, etc., etc.? e) All of the above with only black and white permitted...? f) All of the above with grayscale permitted...? g) All of the above with all colors that a printer can produce permitted...? An interesting question in information storage/retrieval, no? Perhaps it would make a good future interview question... Anyway, love the card punch emulator!
- drekipus 4y ago
  QR codes would probably be best for this, but I don't know how well they can be tiled / scaled. They do have good data compression and error correction though.
  - jononor 4y ago
    If one embeds a sequence number into the data of each QR code, then they can be scanned independently and ordered later using the sequence number.
- buildsjets 4y ago
fredsmith219 4y ago
I want to see an Amdahl emulator running on a Hitachi emulator running on a Fujitsu emulator running on a zos emulator that runs Linux and reads punch cards. Fire up the DASD!
russellbeattie 4y ago
I didn't really grok how punch cards worked until I went to the Computer History Museum and typed one out myself. Then it suddenly clicked. Each punch card represents a single line of plain text. That's it. Usually this was a single line of FORTRAN or COBOL code, but it could also be data like a person's name, age, etc. No idea why I didn't get that before. I may have had the idea that developers back then were writing in binary or something. As you type out the card, the holes are punched and the character is printed along the top, so humans can read it. (Cards can hold binary data as well, but I'm talking about the cards used by programmers and for data input by secretaries - say for new account info, etc.) How many characters can a card hold? 80, of course. Even today, many IDEs will draw a line at 80 columns. I thought it was some pedantic formatting thing. I think many still do. Nope, just a holdover of 1950s tech. A stack of cards? That's akin to a single file, with each line of text data being an individual card. Need to fix a bug? Make a new punch card for that line of code and swap it out. Code reuse is card reuse. Just take that subroutine from one stack and slip it into your program's pile before your next run. Sure, there were typewriters and printers for interactive use, but without magnetic tape or anything like a floppy, this is how you stored your program in a machine readable way.
tiborsaas 4y ago
There's also this perforated tape generator: http://www.kloth.net/services/ttypunch.php http://www.kloth.net/services/ttypunch.php
- robotguy 4y ago
  I've got a real hankering to build one of these that punches (or lasers) actual paper tape. There's quite a few examples of DIY tape readers, but I can't find any for tape punches. Heck, even obtaining the tape seems to be a real PITA.
woofyman 4y ago
My first 2 years of college, all my programs were on punch cards. If your program compiled, ran, and produced the correct output the very first time, you’d hear angels singing. It was a major bummer if the keypunch machine was misaligned and the card reader rejected your deck.
- dalke 4y ago
  > you’d hear angels singing Here's a fun anecdote along these lines from the 1950s. Quoting from "Remembering Philip Rabinowitz (http://www.ams.org/journals/notices/200711/tx071101502p.pdf http://www.ams.org/journals/notices/200711/tx071101502p.pdf) by Philip J. Davis and Aviezri S. Fraenkel about programming the SEAC: """I wrote the code and Phil wrote the double- precision part. I tried to anticipate what scaling would be necessary. I reread my code and checked it for bugs. Phil checked it for bugs. I (or Phil) punched up the code on teletype tape and checked that out. The tape was converted automatically to a wire, and the wire cartridge was inserted in the SEAC. We manually set n = 20, crossed our fingers, held our breath, and pushed the button to run the program. The SEAC computed and computed and computed and computed. Our tension mounted. Finally, the computer started to output the Gaussian abscissas and weights. Numbers purporting to be such started to spew out at the teletype printer. The numbers had the right look and smell about them. We punched in n = 24 and again pushed the “run” button. Again, success. And ditto for even higher values of n. The staff of the NBS computing lab declared us “Heroes of the SEAC”, a title awarded in those days to programmers whose programs ran on the first try—a rare event—and for some while we had to go around wearing our “medals,” which were drawn freehand in crayon on the back of used teletype paper. (The word “hero” was in parody of the practice in the Soviet Union of declaring persons “Heroes of the Soviet Union” for this and that accomplishment.)"""
jejones3141 4y ago
Remember the Christmas wreaths made of carefully twisted and stapled together punched cards painted green or gold? Seriously, I wish I'd kept one deck of a program I wrote in Algol W and my program drum card (A and B).
acrophiliac 4y ago
Oh, man, does this bring back memories. Mostly good ones. When machines were expensive and programming labor was cheap.
nyyp 4y ago
Before the Living Computers: Museum in Seattle was closed, they had a working punch. It was cool to make your own.
duxup 4y ago
We’re there different color cards historically?
- drfuchs 4y ago
  While the main body of a Hollerith card was invariably a light tan, it was typical to have a quarter-inch strip of color across the top. The idea was that you could tell the payroll program (purple) from the inventory program (green). It was also helpful to see which cards in the deck had been revised, if any, as they’d be a different color. Kind of like “revision pages” in a script, or output from “diff”.
- jonjacky 4y ago
  There was indeed often a colored stripe at the top of the card. At computer centers I used, this stripe was used to indicate what JCL (job control language) statement was on the card. So the computer center would have a big stack of pink cards already punched with the statement to invoke the FORTRAN compiler, for example. The teacher told you to put a pink card at the front of your FORTRAN deck before you submitted it, or it wouldn't work.
- mgdlbp 4y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etu-cH-nkIA&t=79s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etu-cH-nkIA&t=79s
  - duxup 4y ago
    What a great clip, thank you!
vincent-manis 4y ago
It disturbs me that, 35 years after IBM stopped making punched-card equipment, I still can read card codes. There are definitely better uses for those neurons. We got personal computers into our university (one lab of Macs for CS and one of PCs for engineers) because of the discontinuation of unit-record equipment. Working with several people from affected departments, I co-authored the proposal that was ultimately approved; we submitted it to the university committee that was struck to manage this transition, the “Committee to Abolish The Card Reader” (yes, that was its official name). To this day, I'm pleased that we managed to bypass time-sharing terminals for our first- and second-year students.
- mgdlbp 4y ago
  Wait... was the https://dotsies.org https://dotsies.org creator aware of punch card reading?
TradingPlaces 4y ago
This hits me right in the nostalgia synapse. As a child I collected baseball cards and IBM punch cards. Of course MLB All-Star Game ballots were a double win

68 points by susam 4y ago

There are various card puncher emulators in the web. I recently stumbled upon https://masswerk.at/keypunch/ https://masswerk.at/keypunch/ which is very nice. In the old days, when X11 was cool, we had https://cyber.dabamos.de/unix/x11/#x026 https://cyber.dabamos.de/unix/x11/#x026

masswerk 4y ago
As the author of one of the pages you mentioned (thanks for that!), I want to point out that the one at kloth.net is much like the original one on the Web. (There may have been earlier ones, but of those that are still around…)

jat850 4y ago

My father worked in early IT days and a major fixture in my home growing up was boxes - and I mean dozens and dozens of boxes filled with thousands each - of punch cards they stopped using (all unpunched). They made for fantastic quick note-taking, grocery-list making, or leaving notes for the family. This is a super fun site from a pure nostalgia perspective.

ggm 4y ago
I still have almost a gross of these. I don't miss chad.

ghewgill 4y ago

My dad was a math professor (he was really a computer nerd, but there was no "computer nerd" course of study back then). Down the hall from his office there was a room with a variety of toys in it, including an IBM 029 [1] which was great fun for me to play with as a kid. (It was noisy and you could make your very own cards you could keep!) Although the card punch was still operational, nobody really used it at that point since interactive terminals had taken over. The computing center had a seemingly infinite supply of cards, and many of them made their way home. My mom to this day (over 40 years later) still uses punch cards as note paper. Good memories. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keypunch#IBM_029_Card_Punch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keypunch#IBM_029_Card_Punch

toast0 4y ago
> My mom to this day (over 40 years later) still uses punch cards as note paper. Good memories. My mom ran out of punch card note pages, sadly. They're a real nice size for taking notes.
danielodievich 4y ago
My educated grandma was a physicist in USSR who coded on punch cards who brought home her programs for note taking. I've taken so many notes on those, learning how to write around the holes. Weirdly enough I found one of her cards in some box that we brought here to USA and gave it to my wife, she has it in her art supplies. That thing is like 70 years old, and I love looking at it!
mgdlbp 4y ago
> IBM 029 demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnnGbcM-H8c&list=PL-_93BVApb59yIG2RELONEYOzJ3lMXsqV&index=10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnnGbcM-H8c&list=PL-_93BVApb... 1968 instructional video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fVRGQT1CoM&t=21s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fVRGQT1CoM&t=21s
dmd 4y ago
My wife (digital archivist at the MIT Museum) and I sent out our wedding invitations on punched cards.
davelondon 4y ago
Same! If you wanted a piece of scrap paper in my house (Dad worked at IBM), a fresh box of used punch cards was never far away.

molbioguy 4y ago

Working with the real thing, I remember the horrible feeling when the rubber band holding the card deck together snaps! The FORTRAN cards all had line numbers, but what a pain for a several hundred line program.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
I heard it mentioned by an old timer that some programmers in those days used to draw a diagonal line with marker across the side of the stack of cards. This was to make sorting the cards faster if the stack was dropped.
- molbioguy 4y ago
  Yes, that helped you. But you still had to put them back in order :( Visual sorting O(n).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

peter_d_sherman 4y ago

You know, punched card decks used to store data -- very small amounts of data, at least relative to tapes -- which in turn stored very small amounts of data relative to disk drives, etc., etc. On that note, if one wanted to make an improvised data storage device, for storing very small amounts of data (for let's say, a future Zombie Apocalypse, or what-have-you!) -- then what about using a Printer/OCR combo -- to store small amounts of data (relatively speaking!) -- as graphical designs, dot graphs, similar to punch cards, in effect, on pieces of ordinary printer paper? Oh sure, it wouldn't store Gigabytes of information, or even Megabytes or Killobytes -- but you could probably fit some early historical computer programs onto standard printer paper -- just printed as dot patterns! Which leads to another interesting question! Given a Printer of X DPI printing capacity, and an OCR of Y DPI scanning capacity: a) What algorithm or algorithms should be used to put the maximum amount of information that can be reliably scanned (100% accuracy every time!) back onto the the page? b) What encoding method should be used? c) What checksumming/CRC/hash/error correcting method should be used to insure 100% accuracy? d) Are there any other potential snags or gotchas, such as the inability to print and/or scan on a specific part of a page and/or issues with inks fading over time, etc., etc.? e) All of the above with only black and white permitted...? f) All of the above with grayscale permitted...? g) All of the above with all colors that a printer can produce permitted...? An interesting question in information storage/retrieval, no? Perhaps it would make a good future interview question... Anyway, love the card punch emulator!

drekipus 4y ago
QR codes would probably be best for this, but I don't know how well they can be tiled / scaled. They do have good data compression and error correction though.
- jononor 4y ago
  If one embeds a sequence number into the data of each QR code, then they can be scanned independently and ordered later using the sequence number.
buildsjets 4y ago

fredsmith219 4y ago

I want to see an Amdahl emulator running on a Hitachi emulator running on a Fujitsu emulator running on a zos emulator that runs Linux and reads punch cards. Fire up the DASD!

russellbeattie 4y ago

I didn't really grok how punch cards worked until I went to the Computer History Museum and typed one out myself. Then it suddenly clicked. Each punch card represents a single line of plain text. That's it. Usually this was a single line of FORTRAN or COBOL code, but it could also be data like a person's name, age, etc. No idea why I didn't get that before. I may have had the idea that developers back then were writing in binary or something. As you type out the card, the holes are punched and the character is printed along the top, so humans can read it. (Cards can hold binary data as well, but I'm talking about the cards used by programmers and for data input by secretaries - say for new account info, etc.) How many characters can a card hold? 80, of course. Even today, many IDEs will draw a line at 80 columns. I thought it was some pedantic formatting thing. I think many still do. Nope, just a holdover of 1950s tech. A stack of cards? That's akin to a single file, with each line of text data being an individual card. Need to fix a bug? Make a new punch card for that line of code and swap it out. Code reuse is card reuse. Just take that subroutine from one stack and slip it into your program's pile before your next run. Sure, there were typewriters and printers for interactive use, but without magnetic tape or anything like a floppy, this is how you stored your program in a machine readable way.

tiborsaas 4y ago

There's also this perforated tape generator: http://www.kloth.net/services/ttypunch.php http://www.kloth.net/services/ttypunch.php

robotguy 4y ago
I've got a real hankering to build one of these that punches (or lasers) actual paper tape. There's quite a few examples of DIY tape readers, but I can't find any for tape punches. Heck, even obtaining the tape seems to be a real PITA.

woofyman 4y ago

My first 2 years of college, all my programs were on punch cards. If your program compiled, ran, and produced the correct output the very first time, you’d hear angels singing. It was a major bummer if the keypunch machine was misaligned and the card reader rejected your deck.

dalke 4y ago
> you’d hear angels singing Here's a fun anecdote along these lines from the 1950s. Quoting from "Remembering Philip Rabinowitz (http://www.ams.org/journals/notices/200711/tx071101502p.pdf http://www.ams.org/journals/notices/200711/tx071101502p.pdf) by Philip J. Davis and Aviezri S. Fraenkel about programming the SEAC: """I wrote the code and Phil wrote the double- precision part. I tried to anticipate what scaling would be necessary. I reread my code and checked it for bugs. Phil checked it for bugs. I (or Phil) punched up the code on teletype tape and checked that out. The tape was converted automatically to a wire, and the wire cartridge was inserted in the SEAC. We manually set n = 20, crossed our fingers, held our breath, and pushed the button to run the program. The SEAC computed and computed and computed and computed. Our tension mounted. Finally, the computer started to output the Gaussian abscissas and weights. Numbers purporting to be such started to spew out at the teletype printer. The numbers had the right look and smell about them. We punched in n = 24 and again pushed the “run” button. Again, success. And ditto for even higher values of n. The staff of the NBS computing lab declared us “Heroes of the SEAC”, a title awarded in those days to programmers whose programs ran on the first try—a rare event—and for some while we had to go around wearing our “medals,” which were drawn freehand in crayon on the back of used teletype paper. (The word “hero” was in parody of the practice in the Soviet Union of declaring persons “Heroes of the Soviet Union” for this and that accomplishment.)"""

jejones3141 4y ago

Remember the Christmas wreaths made of carefully twisted and stapled together punched cards painted green or gold? Seriously, I wish I'd kept one deck of a program I wrote in Algol W and my program drum card (A and B).

acrophiliac 4y ago

Oh, man, does this bring back memories. Mostly good ones. When machines were expensive and programming labor was cheap.

nyyp 4y ago

Before the Living Computers: Museum in Seattle was closed, they had a working punch. It was cool to make your own.

duxup 4y ago

We’re there different color cards historically?

drfuchs 4y ago
While the main body of a Hollerith card was invariably a light tan, it was typical to have a quarter-inch strip of color across the top. The idea was that you could tell the payroll program (purple) from the inventory program (green). It was also helpful to see which cards in the deck had been revised, if any, as they’d be a different color. Kind of like “revision pages” in a script, or output from “diff”.
jonjacky 4y ago
There was indeed often a colored stripe at the top of the card. At computer centers I used, this stripe was used to indicate what JCL (job control language) statement was on the card. So the computer center would have a big stack of pink cards already punched with the statement to invoke the FORTRAN compiler, for example. The teacher told you to put a pink card at the front of your FORTRAN deck before you submitted it, or it wouldn't work.
mgdlbp 4y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etu-cH-nkIA&t=79s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etu-cH-nkIA&t=79s
- duxup 4y ago
  What a great clip, thank you!

vincent-manis 4y ago

It disturbs me that, 35 years after IBM stopped making punched-card equipment, I still can read card codes. There are definitely better uses for those neurons. We got personal computers into our university (one lab of Macs for CS and one of PCs for engineers) because of the discontinuation of unit-record equipment. Working with several people from affected departments, I co-authored the proposal that was ultimately approved; we submitted it to the university committee that was struck to manage this transition, the “Committee to Abolish The Card Reader” (yes, that was its official name). To this day, I'm pleased that we managed to bypass time-sharing terminals for our first- and second-year students.

mgdlbp 4y ago
Wait... was the https://dotsies.org https://dotsies.org creator aware of punch card reading?

TradingPlaces 4y ago

This hits me right in the nostalgia synapse. As a child I collected baseball cards and IBM punch cards. Of course MLB All-Star Game ballots were a double win