How do I punch some Hollerith cards?

November 16, 2007 3:15 PM

How can I get some old computer punch cards punched?

I have a stack of old, blank, 80-column, 7&3/8" computer punch cards from the early 1980s. They are this sort of thing. I checked at my local Office Depot, and they are out of card punching machines at the moment. Any idea how I can get a few cards punched? (I'm thinking of putting some anachronistic stuff on them, like maybe some Java or Perl.)

Obviously, I could find a handheld square punch for the punching. It's printing the characters across the top of the card that I can't easily fake.

posted by neuron to computers & internet (5 comments total)

It's not much, but you may want to track these guys down. Or buy some felt tip pens and draw on them like I did when I was a kid.
posted by rhizome at 3:51 PM on November 16, 2007

Cardmation has done a decent job at reading old Hollerith card decks for me, and offers punching service.
posted by paulsc at 4:12 PM on November 16, 2007

I'd just run them through an inkjet using an appropriate font, then hand punch them, if I wasn't going to actually read them with a reader.

PS: Most of the punches I used to work with didn't annotate the cards.
posted by Orb2069 at 6:41 PM on November 16, 2007

Are you sure that your local university computer lab wouldn't still have a keypunch machine or two ?

P.P.S : All of the machines I ever used DID annotate the cards - that was how you got them back in order if you dropped the deck and hadn't bothered to use sequence numbers.
posted by rfs at 9:54 PM on November 16, 2007

It's printing the characters across the top of the card that I can't easily fake.

Given a punched but unprinted card, that's what used to be called "interpreting" the cards, which many (but not all) card punch machines could do. (We always had yucks in the computer room when an older, un-technical manager wandered through, and called this process "interpolating.")

Obviously, I could find a handheld square punch for the punching.

Not so obviously to me. The punched holes are rectangular, not square; and aligning them by hand would be nigh-on impossible.
posted by Rash at 2:56 PM on November 18, 2007