One of my all time favorite computer history interviews. A recollection of punch card operations (Hollerith & IBM), which is as interesting for the story told as for the charming presentation: “Bubbles” Whiting in an interview by the The Centre for Computing History.
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Very good! Aside from the punched-card experiences (with the verifiers and the collators) we get to hear about the supervisor working on pegboard programming of a new IBM, about the telephonists giving elocution lessons to the young Cockney Bubbles, enabling her later to get receptionist job and to teach her own children to have ‘posh’ accents. Also we hear about a near-miss bomb explosion. And Bunny advises us all to keep an open mind, keep learning, and have an eye to the future when computers are going to be everywhere…
Douglas W Jones from University of Iowa has a quite a decent repository about the punch card technology
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BTW, I built a small application for decoding punched cards (you still have to enter the punches manually in a GUI) with some encodings I was able to find in first party documentations.
These are currently:
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IBM 029 E’L
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IBM 029 EBCD
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IBM 029 German
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IBM 029 E’A (IBM 026 compatible)
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IBM 026 A (Commercial)
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IBM 026 H (Fortran)
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IBM 026 H (IBM 7040 Report)
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IBM 026 H (IBM 7040 Programming)
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IBM 026 BCD (IBM 1401)
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BCDIC (System/360 & System/370)
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EBCDIC (System/360 & System/370)
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ASCII (System/360 & System/370)
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DEC (PDP-8 @ 029)
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ICL (right hand card edge)
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In my report book from my professional training in 1971 I found the code table for the punch cards of the Bull Gamma 30 computer (http://www.feb-patrimoine.com/english/gamma_30.htm) with which the company worked. In the Bull code, the digits are represented in the same way as in the Hollerith code, but lines 7, 8 and 9 for the letters.
I also have a stack of cards from a Telefunken TR 4 and a 96-column card from the IBM System / 3 somewhere in a drawer. I’ll look for it later.
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