14 Dec
2015
14 Dec
'15
7:46 p.m.
On Dec 13, 2015, at 1:20 PM, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
At
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card#/media/File:Blue-punch-card-fron…
is a picture of a card. It was punched with a printing punch, or run through a 029
series interpreter punch, NOT with an INTERPRETER, which didn't line up what it
printed with the columns (too large a font to do so), and couldn't interpret and run
COBOL anyway.
Notice the punches used for the numbers.
The rows above '0' were called 'Y' and 'X'
Now look at the punches used for 'A' and 'B', and the relationship
between them.
Now look at 'K', and compare it with 'J', 'L', and 'B'
Now look at 'T', and compare it with 'S', 'U', 'B', and
'K'
Letters and numbers were a simple easy to learn pattern. I never fully learned the
patterns for punctuation characters, and had to often look them up.
The diagonally cut corner was not always on the left (incompletely standardized)
There was another special purpose punch, called a "VERIFIER".
You loaded it up with cards that were already punched, and proceeded to type from the
same coding sheet. If the whole card matched, then it put a little notch in the 80 end of
the card, to show that its content was confirmed, or "VERIFIED". If the content
didn't match, then the VERIFIER put a notch in the top edge of the card above the
column that didn't match.
Sometimes service bureaus that were hired to keypunch would verify whole boxes of blank
cards. Then they could give their client decks of "VERIFIED" cards, without
having to actually rekey the content. Yes, we did run into them.
Hanging Chad was a miscarriage of justice.
Bury me face down, 9 edge first.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
It almost seems like it was a lot more physical not mental to run computers back in the
day.
So did you have to learn how to read the punch hole
cards also or did
the punch hole cards go into the computer and than printed out the
data on the fan fold paper also was it in code or just plane English?
You COULD
read the holes, if you really HAD to. Keypunches printed
the alphanumeric form on the top edge of the cards. if you punched a
deck of cards on the CPU's card punch, there was no printing. If it
was an "object deck" ie. binary code, you would never "interpret"
the
deck. But, if it had something that might be human readable, there
was a machine called an interpreter, and it would type the symbols on
the top of the card for you. 