Punch
Storing information by punching holes into flat media
On looms, mechanical music instruments, telex paper stripes
Before the 1970, programming and data entry was done - if not by manual entry on a switchboard - via punched cards. One line with up to 80 characters on one card: that made a nice pile for 300 lines of programming code or data.
The project has several branches:
Virtual Punched Card Museum
This is in its 2nd stage, with about 400 punched cards shown, distributed over a set of application areas. Still missing are the cards donated by american collectors, and the non-card items (paper stripe, loom ribbon, mechanical music media, hotel keys etc.
Key punch emulator
There are several ones on the Internet (c.f. link list below). Desired features would be:
- Usage of the card images from the virtual museum
- Generation of an image which can be printed with proper diemensions
- Selection of code sets
- Overpunching
- Realistic sound of an IBM 029
- Usage of a tabulation card
Punch Card Reader
Again, there are services on the Internet which do this, for piles of card images, and not too cheap.
Cardpunch on kloth.net is a nice emulator for card punching.
