When PC Still Means 'Punch Card'

ricst writes: "The New York Times reports that there are stll many applications that use punchcards. "Use what?", you say. Slashdotters not yet in their dotage may have never seen these 80 column Hollerith field cards, or the clunky machines that are still used to punch holes in them. And let's not forget the bizarre JCL (Job Control Language) that's needed to be at the front of the deck. Well... turns out many companies still use them, with slight modifications (like the airlines that print a magnetic strip on them)."

Comments

Interesting

[Burritos]

In the electromechanical tabulator era, long before electronic computers, IBM locked up Herman Hollerith's patents on the punch card. This deprived competitors of access to the medium in which the vast majority of machine-processed documents were originated and maintained. Remington Rand, which acquired the UNIVAC computer family from the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, had a well-established line of tabulating machinery that dodged the IBM Hollerith patents by using 90 column cards with round holes, punched by mechanical punches that punched the entire card at once (and hence allowed correction of errors before the card was punched, unlike IBM gear where one quickly learned, "You can't erase a hole".) Once UNIVAC obtained patents on the key technologies of electronic computing, they were able to license these patents to IBM in return for the rights to the 80 column Hollerith card (which, in retrospect, was not a terribly good idea, strategically speaking), and the Hollerith card became the mainstream input medium for UNIVAC computers.
But if you've designed your whole corporate data processing system around 90 character records, it's very difficult to just lop off the last 10. Early adopters of Remington Rand tabulators and UNIVAC computers continued to soldier along with 90 column cards well into the 1970's. Here's an example I punched in 1972 on a 1930's vintage Remington Rand keypunch while I was employed at Vickers division of Sperry Rand in Troy, Michigan, in the United States.

Re:Seen them!? I punched 'em - still have a box ..

[Bones3D_mac]

Please don't feed the trolls.

Re:Old Timer Story

[Pussy Is Money]

This is a wonderful story. Freedom to read, indeed.