«
»

Retro Scan of the Week: P1-14 Punch Card Terminal

April 23rd, 2007 by Benj Edwards
Phone 1 P1-14 Card-Reader Terminal

Have a dusty stack of old Hollerith-type punch cards sitting in your closet? Then you need this amazing bridge to the past: the Phone 1 P1-14 Card-Reader Terminal. This advertisement, proclaiming a “powerful new concept,” appeared in the February 1979 issue of BYTE magazine. Somehow this terminal seems like an unlikely fusion of new and old, similar to building an abacus into the case of a PowerMac G5. Maybe that’s why no one has ever heard of this unit.

It’s sad to think that some people might have still been using punch cards for data input in 1979, but with the speed at which universities and other institutions updated their equipment, it would be no big surprise. Still, I think this terminal was mainly designed for legacy applications.

Let the punch card memories commence!

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.



This entry was posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2007 at 9:25 am and is filed under Computer History, Design, Regular Features, Retro Scan of the Week. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

6 Responses to “Retro Scan of the Week: P1-14 Punch Card Terminal”

  1. Chris Says:
    April 23rd, 2007 at 10:00 am

    You would be surprised. Here’s an article from 1999 about contemporary punch card installations:

    http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.03/punchcards.html

    And the punch card geezers are still in business:

    http://www.cardamation.com/

  2. Benj Edwards Says:
    April 23rd, 2007 at 12:52 pm

    I seem to recall reading that article back in the day. Thanks for the links, Chris!

  3. viznut Says:
    April 24th, 2007 at 12:03 pm

    Now that you mentioned abacus…

    http://www.hh.schule.de/metalltechnik-didaktik/users/luetjens/abakus/japan/jap.htm#combi

    At the end of the page: Sharp’s “best-of-the-both-worlds” product combining an abacus and a pocket calculator.

  4. KitsuneDarkStalker Says:
    April 24th, 2007 at 6:01 pm

    Heh, that’s pretty cool. 🙂

  5. Zoyous Says:
    April 27th, 2007 at 4:01 pm

    I remember being given massive stacks of punch cards to draw on when I was a young kid in the early 80s. So someone waited pretty late to phase them out, or they had been sitting around in a storage room for quite a while.

  6. Ed Says:
    January 4th, 2015 at 7:21 pm

    Can’t seem to pull up the “Cardamation” website. Have to give it a try later.

Leave a Reply