[GreenKeys] OT: New coffee-table book on punched cards

[Harold Hallikainen]

Looks like a nice book! I was recently looking at early hard drive
information and read that IBM did not want the capacity of the hard drives
to get too high because it would compete with the punched card business.

I remember getting various things on punched cards. An IRS tax refund
check was a punched card. When I first registered for college classes,
we'd wander around the gym collecting a card for each class we wanted to
take. We'd turn the stack in with our student card at the end to get
assigned to classes. The phone bill from Pacific Telephone also came with
a punched card to return with your check.

The coding of punched cards for alpha characters seems like it was an
afterthought. It looks like they were originally just numeric and then
added a couple more rows to allow coding of alphabetic characters. I just
read on Wikipedia that there WAS some binary coding on the cards
(including putting a pair of 36 bit words across the card instead of
encoding in columns). I suspect the original use in looms was a binary
code (each hole caused the loom to select one of two positions on
something), but the use in the census just counted how many cards had a
hole in a particular position which made binary difficult. Still, binary
code on paper tape was introduced around 1900, and it seems binary code
could certainly have been used on cards. They could have started out with
80 columns of ASCII!

Looks like a great book. Thanks for sharing!

Harold

> A new book has come out that I helped create:
>   Print Punch
>   published by CentreCentre, London
>   40 pounds sterling for the special edition (print run, 100 books)
>   30 pounds sterling for the regular edition (print run, 700 books)
>
> Here is the publisher's book list:
> -- https://centrecentre.co.uk/collections/frontpage
>
> The book includes 178 images of punched cards from my collection, mostly
> featuring corporate logos or business forms from around the world.  The
> expensive special edition differs from the regular edition only in:  A
> different color of cover, the addition of a big fat rubber band, and the
> inclusion of an actual punched card from my stock of spare cards (held on
> by the rubber band)..
>
> The IBM archives also provided lots of content and there are some essays
> by others.  It's a nice coffee table book, and a good way for me to make
> the content of my punched card collection more widely available.
>
> It definitely counts as an art book, not a technical reference, but still,
> it seems at least tangentially relevant here.
>
>                 Doug Jones
>                 jones at cs.uiowa.edu
>
> PS:  They paid me, if you can call it that, with a few copies of the
> regular edition.  I don't expect any royalty checks as a result of the
> astounding sales bump this e-mail will certainly produce as people rush to
> buy a useless but pretty book.
>
> PPS:  Yes, if you really want to, you may forward this e-mail anywhere you
> want.  Don't bother asking my permission.
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