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

Wed Feb 12 09:43:32 EST 2020

From: "Ralph Irish" <w8roi at wowway.com> 
To: ka2wft at arrl.net 
Sent: Wednesday, February 12, 2020 9:40:52 AM 
Subject: Re: [GreenKeys] OT: New coffee-table book on punched cards 

One of my ham radio friends was a computer programmer for GM back in the 1970s or so. 
He used to bring home several hundred cards so his wife and mine could make Christmas 
wreathes. Cards were spray painted with random red and green, fast-dry paint, and then 
each card was folded in a certain way to be stapled to others, and gradually, the total array 
was formed into a circle and the two ends stapled together. 

One year there were a handful of cards left over. Maybe 50. I took them to work and 
gave them to the computer operator who worked the midnight shift. He went over to the 
card sorter and ran them through several times, with different parameters. He then took the 
resulting stack to a reader connected to a printer. (The printer was a Model 35, connected 
to an electronic keyboard.) 

Since I worked for Ford, it was interesting to see the reaction of the computer operator as 
he realized what was showing on the printout. Things relating to budget and purchasing 
at the GM Tech Center in Warren, Michgan. My friend did not work there, but his work 
had 'connections' all over the company. 

He was astounded when I handed him the printout. Most curious as to where it came from! 
I told him and also mentioned that the cards were brought back home and used for 'note paper' 
over some following months. 

I think that was the last year for IBM Christmas wreathes. 

73, 

Ralph - W8ROI 

(Then, there were the apocryphal stories about individuals adding a few punches 
here and there and getting strange results from the company that got them back 
in the mail. I heard one fellow used the last card in a stack of 36, as the final 
payment on his car. He got a 'paid in full' statement from the bank, only to have 
another a week or so later nullifying the first one. Someone caught the trick!) 

- - - - - - - - 

From: "Doug Alderdice" <ka2wft at arrl.net> 
To: greenkeys at mailman.qth.net 
Sent: Wednesday, February 12, 2020 9:26:15 AM 
Subject: Re: [GreenKeys] OT: New coffee-table book on punched cards 

Yes, 80-col cards were everywhere at one time. I recall them coming in 
the NY Telephone bills to be returned with your payment. When I started 
teaching HS in the mid-80s they would build the class report lists for 
grading by handing each student a stack of 80-col cards punched with 
their name and student # in homeroom one morning and then they'd give 
one to each teacher throughout the day, and we as teachers were given a 
stack of cards punch with course/class period info and we'd build a deck 
for each class period and turn it all in at the end of the day. That 
continued surprisingly late; it was well into the 90s that we were still 
doing that. 

The NYS Thruway (I-90) for eons handed each motorist an 80-col card when 
they entered and on it was printed the toll for each exit, and it was 
punched (round hole punches, so whatever system that was) with the toll 
entrance number and vehicle class. You handed that over with your toll 
payment at your exit. 

I cut my programming teeth with 80-column cards. My high school had a 
comp sci program and an IBM 360/30. We did all our programming in 
Fortran, though COBOL and one or two other languages were available on 
the system we had; RP/G, maybe? I did a couple of programs in COBOL 
just for grins, but everything else was Fortran. The one computer 
teacher used to write hall passes on the backs of discarded punch cards, 
which were of course extremely plentiful in the key punch room. 

Doug, KA2WFT 

On 2/12/2020 12:30 AM, Harold Hallikainen wrote: 
> 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. 
______________________________________________________________ 
GreenKeys mailing list 
Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/greenkeys 
Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm 
Post: mailto:GreenKeys at mailman.qth.net 

2002-to-present greenkeys archive: http://mailman.qth.net/pipermail/greenkeys/ 
1998-to-2001 greenkeys archive: http://mailman.qth.net/archive/greenkeys/greenkeys.html 
Randy Guttery's 2001-to-2009 GreenKeys Search Tool: http://comcents.com/tty/greenkeyssearch.html 

This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net 
Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html 
Message delivered to w8roi at wowway.com 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.qth.net/pipermail/greenkeys/attachments/20200212/aa161e9e/attachment.html>