IBM punch cards

[LCHIEN]

It's been 51 years since graduating college, I still had a stack of blank 80 column Hollerith data cards AKA IBM cards. About 500 of them. I was going to dump them in the trash since no one has used those in years, but I decided to check eBay. Holy smokes, COMPLETED AUCTIONS showed single card sales at a buck, sets of ten blanks went for $6.50 to $20. I guess i have to go on eBay.


as an aside I had some of these I made back then... a product of boredom while waiting for my jobs to run. Spent way too much time at the computer center.

[leehljp]

I remember the punch cards well and remember when my college started using them. The punch card era, even the first year at the college I attended, was smoother in getting my schedule than the year before was without punch cards.


How many things did we discard years ago that would make us semi-wealthy if we had kept them

I can't even imagine how many baseball cards I wore out on my bicycle by using clothes pins to clip them to the fender rails so that they would flap against the spokes. Sounded great but destroyed some "now" probably valuable cards.

I have one comic book well worn and torn that a comic book collector told me 25 years ago would be worth $500 if like new - then. But as it was then worth about $25.

[cwsmith]

Yes Sir, Loring I remember them well.

From late 1964 through early 1966 I worked in a data processing department for the home office of an insurance company. "Data Maintenance Clerk", I punched cards and ran various machines to handle monthly billing cycles. Keypunch was a really boring job for me, but the fourth week of ever month I ran practically every machine in the center, everything from collators to card sorters and even the 1401, 1402, and 1403 (central processor, card reader, and high speed printer).

While I enjoyed that task, I left to go to night school and learn tool design. In the midst of that I landed a job as a technical illustrator and my very first project was to illustrate the IBM 029 keypunch machine and the 059 card varifier. (I still have my pencil layout of the card feed assembly, my very first illustration.) Back then, everything was 'double-punched', first with the actual punching of the 80-column cards with the data, and then the stack would be given to an operator on an 059 who would key the data again, except instead of punching the hole, that machine would read the previously-punched holes, verifying the accuracy.

I'm thinking that somewhere around here I should still have my text book from data processing class I took way back then. It described many of the machines used with punch-card processing.

CWS

[Jim Frye]

My first I/T job was an internship at DeVilbiss Company. I sorted on 12 columns and interpreted 250,000 order entry cards for input the NCR computer that had a 3,000 card/minute reader. I also did the "rip/strip/bind" operation for the green bar printed output. The key punch staff hated it when I showed up run the burster to separate the continuous forms into single sheets for binding. The machine sounded like a machine gun. I also still have some 80 column punch cards, some 96 column punch cards, some magnetic cards, 8" diskettes, 3 1/2" diskettes, a magnetic tape end crimper, and a complete IBM CE Portable Terminal (also known as a Brick due its shape, size, and weight).

[Slik Geek]

My first programming class in college used punch cards for program entry. Took much more time to get results and debug than today's programing on a monitor with your own personal processor. It takes a couple seconds to do what took half an hour back in the day. Plus, when you dropped your deck of cards... what a pain to get them back in proper order.

[LCHIEN]

Imagine if you dropped your thumb drive and all the data got scrambled...

[Jim Frye]

My first programming class in college used punch cards for program entry. Took much more time to get results and debug than today's programing on a monitor with your own personal processor. It takes a couple seconds to do what took half an hour back in the day. Plus, when you dropped your deck of cards... what a pain to get them back in proper order.

Been there, done that, didn't like it. When I was serving in the Air Force, I did that. At the time our particular programming office was across the base from the computer center. I had a 400 card program deck in a tray and was rushing back to the office. I put the tray on the roof of my car while I put a pile of printouts inside. I drove off with the tray still on the roof. I made it halfway to the office before the tray slid off of the roof, scattering the deck across the street, and getting run over by a passing fuel truck. To add insult to injury, someone at the computer center saw me leave and called my office to tell them I'd be a bit late and why. I managed to gather up all of the cards and was greeted with a standing ovation when I got to the office.

[pearson]

good old times. IBM punch cards feel like a blast from the past, a reminder of how far technology has come. It’s funny to imagine using a Pogo stick https://pogo.pissedconsumer.com/customer-service.html to deliver those cards across an office—definitely a unique office commute! Technology evolves, but seeing old systems in action teaches a lot about patience and precision.