Cards not for Keypunch Use

• CDC copyright card
• IBM memo cards
• ICL memo card
• Punch problem card
• A University of Akron cover card
• A New South Wales Institute of Technology cover card
• An Ohio State University cover card
• A UCLA cover card
• U.S. Defense Department (Navy) cover card
• A Collins Radio surplus property bid card
• IBM Magnetic Recording Card

CDC copyright card

This very small deck of cards has been shrink-wrapped to a cardboard backing. The first card in the deck is a Control Data Corp. copyright-notice card with instructions to remove before reading the card deck and to immediately replace at the head of the deck after reading.

The copyright notice card has the number 76 printed on it, presumably the date 1976, and the notation ABC LOADER and NOS2. Note that NOS was Control Data's Network Operating System, used across their family of large computers during the 1970s. It is a good guess that this loader, occupying only a few punched cards, was in a binary format so it could be used during the bootstrap process.

This card has no printer's mark.

IBM memo cards

Many people used unpunched cards for memos, doodling, grocery lists and other purposes. IBM recognized this and printed two sided cards for this purpose, printing lines for handwritten text on one side and a bit of graph paper on the other side. Pro memoria in Latin means "for the sake of memory." Of course, nothing prevented use of these cards in a keypunch.

This card was printed by IBM.

Someone at IBM Germany thought that something a bit more forceful might be useful, so they had these cards made. Darf ich Sie daran erinnem means "may I remind you of this."

This card was printed by IBM Germany.

ICL memo card

ICL, a British computer manufacturer from 1968 to 2000 also printed a memo card. ICL's punched-card business was much older than the company, being inherited from its predecessor companies ICT dating to 1959, which inherited from the British Tabulating Machine Company, founded in 1902.

This card was probably printed by ICL.

Punch problem card

All machines that have paper transport paths occasionally jam. In the case of card punches, clearing a punch jam sometimes leads to the loss of the card being punched at the time of the jam, but depending on where in the paper path the jam happened, it can also lead to punching a duplicate card. Given that the computer operator generally has no clue about what is being punched, the most they can do is signal that a problem occurred by placing a marker card on top of the output stack before restarting the punch.

This card from the University of Kansas computer center, bears no indication of who printed it. It came with other cards from Kansas. While it may have been locally mimeographed, the print quality suggests that it may have been printed on a sheet-fed offset press.

A University of Akron cover card

Before the development of real operating systes, computer operators were responsible for setting up the machine for each job and monitoring the user programs while they ran. This card is essentially a structured memo to the computer operator that would be rubber banded or boxed with the deck of cards a user submitted as one job.

This card was printed by the University of Akron Computer Center on the reverse side of an off-the-shelf blue DD 5081 card. It may well have been locally printed using a mimeograph machine.

A New South Wales Institute of Technology cover card

This card from the New South Wales Institute of Technology is essentially a cover card, serving as a job card or as an auxiliary to a job card from the era when, for example, it might have required signed authorization from a lecturer for a student to submit a job to be run on a campus mainframe computer. This is a two-sided card, with space on the back for free-form narrative instructions.

This card was printed by DCA.

An Ohio State University cover card

Before the development of real operating systes, computer operators were responsible for setting up the machine for each job and monitoring the user programs while they ran. This card is essentially a structured memo to the computer operator that would be rubber banded or boxed with the deck of cards a user submitted as one job. Operators would use the information on these cards to sort jobs into compatible batches, and then remove the memos from the card decks for each batch, mount the tapes (volumes) requested, and then run the jobs in the batch. While the job runs, the operators job was to enforce the resource limits documented on the cards for that batch on running time, memory use, pages of printout and cards punched. If a job exceeided its limits, the operator would intervene. By the mid 1960s, all of this was being automated, with the information moved onto a job card or into the text of the command language used to run the job.

Unlike most of the cards here, this card has no form number or other hint of who printed it. The only reason we know that it came from Ohio State is that it came to this collection with a stack of cards from there.

A UCLA cover card

This cover card was to be attahed to a card deck submitted to the IBM 360/91 at the University of California at Los Angeles computer center when the associated job required special setup such as mounting magnetic tapes that had to be fetched from the tape library before the job was run or returned to the tape library after. The card was slightly oversized, so it could not be run through the card reader.

The card has a plate number but no hit of who printed it.

U.S. Defense Department (Navy) cover card

If your deck of punched cards contained information critical to the national defense of the United States, you had to protect that information somehow. The solution provided by the government was a "cover sheet" in the form of a card that was to be placed at the head of each such deck of cards. This was in card format, but it was on stock a bit thicker than a card. Therefore, as with the CDC copyright card, this card had to be removed from the card deck prior to reading the deck, and added back later, after the deck was read. The form number NDW-NAVCOSSACT 5511/13 (12-67) suggests that this is U.S. Navy form issued in December 1967. The notation GPO 898.173 indicates that it was printed by the Government Printing Office; that is their plate number for the card.

A Collins Radio surplus property bid card

As organizations reached the end of the punched card era, they sometimes found that they had a large stock of cards on hand. Sometimes, the excess inventory was simply sent to the landfill, but sometimes, it was disposed of through the organization's surplus property disposal organization. That happened at North American Rockwell's Collins Radio Division, formerly the Collins Radio Company (it is now, Collins Aerospace).

When the Rockwell Collins surplus store got the job of selling the company's surplus punched cards, they repurposed some of them, printing the backs with as surplus property bidding forms. While some surplus was sold on a retail cash and carry basis, larger items were put up for bid. These forms were never used as punched cards, the card format was used only because the cards were there and big enough for the job.

The number 074-8215-310 on the surplus property bidding form is not a plate number. Rather, it seems to be an inventory number. Compare it with the 074-1000 numbers on the original front side of the card, where it appears that 074-1000 means punched card, and the suffix from 0 to 3 specifies color. Also note that the print quality on the bidding form is much better than the print on typical punched cards.

The card was originally made by IBM.

IBM Magnetic Recording Card

In 1969, IBM introduced the Magnetic Card Selectric Typewriter. This was a conventional selectric typewriter, augmented with solenoids and microswitches that allowed it to communicate over a parallel connection with an electronics system that had a mag-card drive that could read and write cards like the one shown here. The IBM Office System 6, introduced in 1977, also used mag-cards. A high resolution image is available.

When IBM invented the idea of a soft mylar recording medium that flexed (or flopped) over the record/playback head, they came out with two distinct recording media, the floppy disk and the magnetic card. The mag-card drive rolled the card into a cylindrical holder, magnetic side inward. The record-playback head spun around, inside this cylinder, moving along the axis to select data tracks. The tracks ran the length of the card, one line of text per track and one card per page.

IBM's mag cards were exactly the same size as punched cards, so all of the standard office furnature for filing punched cards could also be used for filing mag cards. Many different vendors offered card file-cabinets, so this made it very easy for businesses to keep machine-readable copies of all of their documents in the era just before good disk-based file systems began emerged.