[ Retro Scan of the Week ] NCSU Computer Punch Card
February 25th, 2008 by Benj Edwards
I found this wonderfully stamped card in an old, metal, 20-drawer punch card filing cabinet that I bought from a N.C. State University surplus sale late last year. Actually, it was one of many hundreds of such cards, most of which were rubber-banded together in program stacks for the psychology department.
I’m no expert on punch card-era computers, so I’ll let the more knowledgeable amongst us do the talking. It’s a great piece of history, though. I’m currently using the card cabinet as a tool chest.
If you use this image on your site, please support “Retro Scan of the Week” by giving us obvious credit for the original scan and entry. Thanks.
February 26th, 2008 at 8:35 am
I’d be interested in someone converting 962123.0121. etc. into code type syntax (ASM, pseudo-code, BASIC, C, whatever)….unless that just represented data of some sort.
Layne
February 27th, 2008 at 8:15 am
Reminds me of the old Stan Rogers song.
THE WHITE COLLAR HOLLER
Well, I rise up every morning at a quarter to eight
Some woman who’s my wife tells me not to be late
I kiss the kids goodbye, I can’t remember their names
And week after week, it’s always the same
And it’s Ho, boys, can’t you code it, and program it right
Nothing ever happens in the life of mine
I’m hauling up the data on the Xerox line
Then it’s code in the data, give the keyboard a punch
Then cross-correlate and break for some lunch
Correlate, tabulate, process and screen
Program, printout, regress to the mean
And it’s Ho, boys, can’t you code it, and program it right
Nothing ever happens in the life of mine
I’m hauling up the data on the Xerox line
Then it’s home again, eat again, watch some TV
Make love to my woman at ten-fifty-three
I dream the same dream when I’m sleeping at night
I’m soaring over hills like an eagle in flight
And it’s Ho, boys, can’t you code it, and program it right
Nothing ever happens in the life of mine
I’m hauling up the data on the Xerox line
Someday I’m gonna give up all the buttons and things
I’ll punch that time clock till it can’t ring
Burn up my necktie and set myself free
Cause no’one’s gonna fold, bend or mutilate me.
February 28th, 2008 at 11:37 am
I wonder what would last longer (and still have recoverable data) in a drawer: CD-R or a punch card?
February 28th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
Probably a punch card. But a CD-R holds a lot more data. 🙂
If they were used in a binary fashion, 80 column punch cards like this one can hold roughly 80 bytes of data, whereas CD-Rs can store up to 736,966,656 bytes. That’s over nine million times as much data, which makes it that much more painful when the medium fails prematurely. 🙂
February 28th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
I’ve been burning CD-Rs since 1997 and have only had a couple become unreadable since then. When I think about the ultimate impossibility of preserving data due to the various physical and mechanical vulnerabilities, I guess losing a couple in a decade ain’t too bad.
March 10th, 2008 at 7:18 am
Wow – very cool. I went to NCSU, and so seeing this evokes memories of my time there.
How neat to find such a memento – I’m jealous!
December 6th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
wow! my dad used to have boxes of these that had never been punched …our family used them mostly for writing notes on, taking phone messages etc. when we got our first nintendo i used them for writing down passwords, never realizing what their actual purpose was…i remember wondering what purpose the numbers on them served as a young child and then my brain never thought of them as anything more than scrap paper. i hope i can find some more in our attic or something.