Monday, April 16, 2012

Department of Acquisitions: punch card printing plate

The Dougintology Technology Museum has come into possession of some spiffy things recently. Pictured here us a printing plate for punchcards. You remember your parents or professors talking about writing programs on hundreds, if not thousands, of punch cards and then dropping them and spending a couple of hours putting them in the right order? These aren't them. This particular plate printed punch cards that stored customer order data. It has fields for Product Code, Product Description, Customer Number, Order Number, and on like that. Then there's numbers 0-9 and other numbers at the bottom numbering the columns 1-80.
Now that I've noted the number of columns, I wonder if the fact that these had 80 columns helped determine the width of the dumb terminals that followed or if it was just a coincidence.

Aluminum punch card printing plate for Canadian Industries Ltd. 

In the background you can see Gandolf trying to stay clear of this new menace.

2 comments:

Waseem said...

I am very glad to know about it...you use it for Membership card printing.

Ibid said...

You do realize the rules have changed, don't you? By posting this link Google will bump you down the search list instead of up. So instead of deleting it, I'm leaving it right there.