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

[Cory Heisterkamp]

When I first started, 20 years ago, working for a company that makes those
green tractors you see out in the fields, there was a room full of card
cabinets chock full of aperture cards, each one representing a unique part
number. We're talking on the order of 100's of thousands of individual
cards. Looking at the book preview, the image on page 6 looks like it could
have been taken there. This was out at the factory built around '80, and
the offices had been later modernized (we're talking about the year 2k,
after all), but these were still there in the 'print room'. Sadly, just a
few years ago, they needed more cubicle space and all those cards and
cabinets vanished. Where they went, I have no idea.

At the engineering center, there was a vertical, motorized tub system. That
went away right as I was starting since almost all parts had already been
scanned, and every engineer starting had a Windows box.

Going back a few years, IBM had a system that would allow an engineer to
'check out' an app card remotely from their terminal; this would also set a
flag in case someone else was trying to access the same card, and would
inform them when it was again available. I want to say a camera routed the
image to an adjacent CRT on the users' end. -C

On Tue, Feb 11, 2020 at 9:02 PM Jones, Douglas W <douglas-w-jones at uiowa.edu>
wrote:

> 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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