4 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2025
    1. Begun, George M. “Making Your Own Punched Cards.” Journal of Chemical Education 32, no. 6 (June 1, 1955): 328. https://doi.org/10.1021/ed032p328.

      George Begun used a template of "heavy galvanized iron" to drill holes into his 5 x 8" index cards to create his own edge-noted card system for use in his chemistry work. Rather than using commercially made sorting needles, he recommended the use of a ice pick with a dulled point "for safety".

  2. Feb 2024
    1. https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/2356693964529700/

      2024-01 Offering three Cole Steel card filing cabinets for $165 each. Industrial beige 20 gauge steel in good condition with locks.

      Size: 52 h x 19 w x 29 d

      10 sections of 2 drawers for 20 actual drawers.

      Based on communication with the seller their internal space is 4" high by 7.5" so they were likely designed for punch cards (7 3/8 by 3 1/4").

      Cost per drawer: $8.25.

  3. Jul 2021
    1. They were input laboriously by hand either on punched cards, with each card holding up to eighty characters or one line of text (uppercase letters only), or on paper tape, where lower-case letters were perhaps possible but which could not be read in any way at all by a human being. Father Busa has stories of truckloads of punched cards being transported from one center to another in Italy. All computing was carried out as batch processing, where the user could not see the results at all until printout appeared when the job had run.

      It may be of interest to some that the first 'computer' used punch cards and tape; it was the Jacquard loom. Here is a link to information about the Jacquard loom and it's influence on computing. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/jacquard.html