Research into what, strange hoarding behavior? 
:eek: :eek: :eek:
(this is where my computer-geek and library-geek interests collide)
Keep the thing!!! Seriously, how many science museums actually have such a machine on display? Very few, if any at all. Buy it, keep it, loan it to a museum, who can be responsible for looking after it…for God’s sake, the whole thread involved asking what punchcards were, and you’re advising stripping the very machines involved for a few grams of precious metal?..
GPA, Extra-curricular Activities and Personality and their Relationship to the Professional Success of Advertising Graduates. C’mon. Don’t you think that’s worthy of a follow up.
Museums generally don’t want them. From this source:
The IBM 360, of course, was hardly a rarity, and it would take up a lot of space in a museum.
Heaven Forbid if we where still using punch cards today.
Then again, It might stop AOL from sending me there software. (Can you imagine all those cards in your mail box?)
[Python] Punch Cards? I dreamed of being able to use punch cards when I learned to program.[/Python]
The machine I used in high school had paper tape only. Real men loaded the assembler on a mylar tape (so it didn’t tear.)
The typical mainframe job was
green card
JCL
Program
Data
but punch cards were used everywhere. The entire Pinkdex (named after Fuzzy Pink, who later married Larry Niven) which was the index of all the books in the MIT Science Fiction Society Library, was kept on punch cards when I was there. It was the job of the librarian to run them all through a card sorter in the MIT Computer Center every so often, which could be programmed to sort on different columns. Then you ran them through another card reader which was connected to a printer. All of this was done off-line.
So punchcards were like CD-Roms? Or floppies? I remember floppies. I remember when floppies were actually floppy, even! 
I had no idea punchcards were used into the eighties. Weird.
Not strictly true. I worked as a data entry operator in the late 1970s (during the summers) and punch-cards were the primary input method used by us “keypunchers”. The data would then be stored on the mainframe’s hard drive. One of the places I worked actually did have some old data stored on punch cards, but I don’t know how common this ever was - In this particular place, it was a nightmare because about every 50th card would jam and tear, requiring painstaking manual repunching on an old keypunch machine in another room.
I know my second keypunching job did something with the punched-out bits; I went to dump my bin in the trash one time and they stopped me. I think it got sold for confetti-making, honestly.
The only time I ever used a teletype-machine was for one physics class in college. It sucked.
Well, kind of a read-only floppy. If you wanted to change the program or data, you punched a new card for the changed line, threw out the old and inserted the new, you hoped in the right place.
I remember big floppies - bigger than the ones that came with the firt PCs. We had an HP machine hooked to a nice plotter that we used for drawing pictures in the days before color laser printers.
An interesting challenge: how to describe an “antique’s” uses in modern terms. Okay, so I date myself by admitting that I learned programming with punch cards. I was in school right as terminals were coming in, but punch cards were still in wide use.
For programming, punch cards were a means of 1) inputting your project (program) into the computer and running it and 2) retaining your project. A floppy might be considered sort of similar, but the difference is that you tend to copy things from computers’ internal storage (HDD) to floppies, and vice versa. The thing with punch cards is that there was no access (except temporarily - remember back in those days disk storage was in short supply as well) to the internal HDD. This is a key difference to the way things work today. Be it a school’s computer or your own, you have the ability (luxury 
of simply storing your work on some internal storage. From there you can dump it to a floppy or CD-ROM. But back in the day, you literally had to carry your work around with you - it never “resided” anywhere in the computer.
So the way it worked was that you wrote up your program. Sat down at the keypunch. Punched out your program, line at a time, on cards you had purchased at the bookstore (didn’t know about that, did you ? ;-). When you were ready, you’d submit your deck - typically into an “in” box. Some time later, you’d pick up your deck from an “out” box (close to the end of a class, when paranoia and theft ran high, you’d actually wait for your deck to come out). And even later still, you’d pick up your print out which gave you your results. That was your interaction with the computer.
So the cards provided the media with which to communicate with the computer. It was like a detached keyboard setup. Similarly, you wouldn’t get your results on a screen in real-time. Instead you’d have to wait for your printout.
So an equivalent for today might be that you would need to use a typewriter (if you have to ask what that is, we’re in even bigger trouble to type out a program. You’d then hand the pages to another person who’d scan it in, and have the program run on his computer. He’d then let you see the results on his screen, but you weren’t allowed to have any files on his hard drive.
So in order for you to change the program, you’d have to take the actual sheets of paper and type on them. Those sheets of paper were your only means of getting your program into this computer. So needless to say, if they were lost or were mangled, you’d have to start over again.
And yes, I still have boxes of school projects sitting in my garage. Can’t even consider tossing them
We had a network of IBM PET computers at college with a punch tape writer/reader - the tape was about an inch wide, traversed by a single row of 8 (possible) holes to encode a single byte of program or data - we only ever used the thing to make Christmas decorations; sending it the necessary patters of bytes to punch out dot patterns like snowflakes.
The first computer I had contact with in school read punch tapes for our programming, but at least once a week it would crash and then the students that ran the computer lab had to reprogram it by setting toggle switches. It had maybe fifty toggle switches and they would set them, then hit a button (Enter?) then reset them and hit the button again then repeat that process for a couple of hours.
Any idea what sort of machine that might have been?
Then again—just to confuse the issue—there’s what I started out with (along with “programming” electric accounting machines). However, these cards came along just before the intruduction of the 8" floppy, so they never really caught on. Anyway, you couldn’t put nearly as long a grocery list on one.
cormac, thanks! That was an excellent bit of teaching. (Are you an educator? You should be!) I’m afraid I was so completely ignorant that most of the other posts went over my head - except that there were pretty pictures, and corners of punched-out bits were sharp. Now the other posts make more sense.
I vaguely remember that one column was reserved for the card sequence number and if you dropped the deck you could put them in a sorting machine and get the thing straightened out.
Tell me my memory isn’t failing.
David,
Not one column, several columns.
With 1 column, you could nunber the cards from 0 to 9, and keep just 10 cards in order, no more. With two columns the sequence numbers could range from 00 to 99 and yuo could keep 100 cards straight. With 3 columns, 1000, etc.
You may be thinking of how the sorter worked. A basic mechanical card sorter had 1 input hopper and 12 output hoppers. It would look at one column on the card and dump the card into one of the 12 hoppers depending on what that one column said.
For numbers, the last 2 hoppers were ignored and cards with a zero in the column went to hopper # zero, cards with a 1 to the #1 hopper, etc., up to hopper #9.
To sort a jumbled deck, you’d put all the cards in the input hopper, adjust a dial to sort on the lowest-significance column of yuor sequence numbers (the 1’s column) and push the Start button.
All the cards would run through the machine and you’d end up with 10 small piles in the 10 output hoppers. Then you’d pick them all up, making sure to put the zero hopper cards on the bottom and the 9 hopper cards on top. Then you’d put the stack back into the input hopper, reset the machine to look at the next column to the left (the 10’s column), and run them through again.
At the end of that step, they’d be in order on the last 2 digits, but still jumbled on the higher sifgnificance digits.
So you’d have to repeat the procedure once for each column in the sequence number, which were usually 8 columns.
It could take 10 minutes to sort a 5000 line program or data file that way.
And if you dropped more than a card or two any time in the process, you’d get to start over.
I also had a program (on punch cards naturally) which played music on a 1403 line printer. It had a range of almost 2 octaves and used a musical notation I created that oddly enough looks almost identical to the modern code standard used for cellphone ringtones.
It was especially cool because you could never tell when your batch job would roll off the printer, so you submitted your job and hung out nochalantly until somebody noticed the printer was making music.
Now I can see why the computer guys and gals glared at us klutzy engineers if we dropped a deck of cards.
A variation of them was used even longer than that! We have an CNC lathe at school, which has a paper tape reader (basically the same thing as a punch card). It was built in the early 1990s! (I’ve tried finding the necessary machine to encode the paper tape, but haven’t had any luck.)