Warped punched cards

In the mid 1960s, my father did some social science research work for CBS, including their "National Driver's Test". The impetus for him to learn FORTRAN was the botched job that IBM did on the programming of the data analysis of the driver's test. On screen, you could see Walter Cronkite stalling for time, while my father, behind him, was frantically manually calculating, so that at least the percentages added to 100. In several of their later projects, they actually distributed "Port-a-punch" cards, and had people slap a stamp onto them and MAIL THEM! SOME had to be completely repunched, and some had to be duplicated one at a time on an 029. BUT, MOST of them were readable! I heard that what they did was use a simple hydraulic press on the decks, and then IBM enlarged (opened to its maximum?) the gate of the card reader. ("Port-a-punch" cards were ordinary IBM cards that were pre-perforated on every other column, giving 40 columns of data) -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com