Punched Cards

Punched cards were, in the 1960's the universal symbol of computing, and even in the 1930's, they were a symbol of modernity. Today, cards are all but forgotten, surviving in a few applicatons such as turnpike toll receipts and automatic voting systems.

Historical Information

• An illustrated technical history
• All about chad?
• A Collection of Cards
• Do not fold, spindle or mutilate": A cultural history of the punch card by Steven Lubar of the Smithsonian Institution.
• USPTO Punched Card Patents 1887-1944 indexed by Hans B. Pufal and J. Pain of Grenoble.

Codes used on Punched Cards

There were multiple mappings between the 12 holes of one card column and the character sets of various machines and keypunches.

Punched Card Emulation

The following software is available to encourage the development of museum quality emulators for antique computing and punched-card tabulating equipment:

• An ASCII to card-deck filter
• A card-deck to ASCII filter
• A tool to concatenate emulated card-decks

The file format used by these programs is available, and I hope that emulators for historical computer architectures will support interchangable punched card I/O using this format and that a suite of emulated punched card data processing machines will be developed.

Paul Mattes has created an 026 keypunch emulator that supports this format and runs under X11 on Linux and some other Unix compatible systems! See x026 for a demo and an animated GIF of the user interface.

Other punched card resources

• A keypunch emulator
• The Hollerith Tabulating Machine web pages from A Chronological History of Computing at Columbia University.
• Everything about Punched Cards from the Museum Waalsdorp in Holland, with illustrations of punched card machinery.
• IBM Punch Card Systems in the U.S. Army with good illustrations of pre-computer card processing equipment.
• A brief illustrated personal history
• Cardamation. Yes, there is still a place to rent or buy punched card data processing equipment.
• Data Maintenance offers service contracts on punched card equipment.
• U.S. Card Corporation, 210 Wall Street, Tiffin, Ohio 44883, phone (419) 447-3012, sells punched cards.