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
• Punched-Card Accessories

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

• The IBM Punched Card a well-done bit of self promotion from the company that led in the development of punched-card based data processing.
• Herman Hollerith from Columbia University.
• Punched Card Equipment from the former IEEE Global History Network has a good discussion of Herman Hollerith's career and his inventions.
• Everything about Punched Cards from the Museum Waalsdorp in Holland, with illustrations of punched card machinery.
• Do not fold, spindle or mutilate": A cultural history of the punch card by Steven Lubar of the Smithsonian Institution.
• IBM Punch Card Systems in the U.S. Army with good illustrations of pre-computer card processing equipment.

• Georg Fischer's punched card collection
• Jim Scott's punched card collection
• John Walker's brief illustrated personal history
• IBMjunkman's punched card collection

Punched cards were still commercially available from the California Tab Card Company of Whittier California as late as 2016, but their web site has since disappeared.

Cardamation was the last place to rent or buy punched-card data processing equipment. The owner, Robert G. Swartz died on Dec. 16, 2011, and it appears that Cardamation is no longer.

U.S. Card Corporation, formerly of Tiffin, Ohio, has closed its doors, as of early 2005, after a run of 32 years in the punched-card business.