Punch

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Revision as of 16:28, 17 July 2017 by imported>Gfis
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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.

http://www.punctum.com/interest/punch/img/c0093.jpg