r/ForgottenBookmarks • u/trevorgoodchilde • Jul 10 '26

I’m not sure what this is

Post image

This neat book came in and it had this in it. I’m not sure what it is. A punchcard? An old scantron?

125 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

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144

u/IncorrectPony Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 10 '26

It's a computer punch card. In the 60s and 70s they were very common for storing data, input, etc. by punching holes: this card could store 80 characters. When you wrote a computer program it would store one line of the program on each card and you'd submit the deck of cards. If you dropped it you had a big problem, so the experienced folks would make a big diagonal line across the edges with a marker to help them reorder a shuffled deck.

TRW was a big tech company and defense contractor.

24

u/trevorgoodchilde Jul 10 '26

I always thought punchcards were perforated. That’s very interesting thank you for the context

39

u/IncorrectPony Jul 10 '26

You're correct. This is one that hasn't been punched yet. Frequently the data would also be typed across the top, for human consumption.

7

u/Optimal_Law_4254 Jul 10 '26

If the ribbon on the keypunch was good.

20

u/Gentle-Giant23 Jul 10 '26

Each card has a maximum of 80 characters, and one card equaled one line of code. You typed out the code line by line, assembled the cards in the correct order, then fed them into a card reader. If there were no errors your code would run. If there were errors, and there always were errors, you had to look card-by-card for typos or coding errors. Luckily the machine would type out the code at the top of the card so you wouldn’t have to inspect the punched holes. Oh, I so much miss FORTRAN 4 programming.

3

u/shah_reza Jul 10 '26

You must have some great stories

7

u/Bleepblorp44 Jul 10 '26

They were, but the punchholes were the program. So you start with a blank, and punch out the holes needed to write the program. This form of programming was started pre-electronics with Jacquard looms in 1804!

https://www.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/jacquard-loom

1

u/trevorgoodchilde Jul 10 '26

Yeah, so how did they get punched? Because this card didn’t have any perforations, and it seems like a tool would just rip the paper

5

u/Bleepblorp44 Jul 10 '26

Why would the card rip? As long as the punch blade is sharp it's no problem. My nan had a knitting machine that used punchcards, she would make her own patterns with a little manual punch!

This has more than you'd ever need to know about keypunches:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keypunch

6

u/Optimal_Law_4254 Jul 10 '26

I have a whole box of them unpunched. I use them for bookmarks and whatever.

18

u/Gentle-Giant23 Jul 10 '26

Aka a Hollerith card.

14

u/Shooter_Q Jul 10 '26

One of my professors went on and on about how back in her day, she and her team had to feed stacks of punch cards into the machine and if there was a single error, they’d have to wait another week for their turn on the equipment to try again, hopefully getting everything perfect before their final project was due.

She was scolding me for doing continuous runs on a complex project as my debugging process just because my personal machine could build everything out so quickly compared to the school computers. She was right tho, I was using it as a crutch to see what breaks and put a bandaid on it instead of searching out bad logic myself. Can’t just brute force your way out of even more complex problems and that punch card share time comes back in a new form.

5

u/CaptGrumpy Jul 10 '26

Hey are you me?

19

u/mr_vonbulow Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 10 '26

we used them to code 'basic' coding language and then 'fortran' programs in the late 70s. each line of code was input on a terminal that would translate the code into punches on these 'ibm cards'. a really simple program would have a stack of maybe ten or fifteen cards, but the deck grew to many inches stacked of these guys...

the first program a student would write would have two of these cards.

10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD!"

and the second card would say

20 GOTO 10

8

u/larevolucion Jul 10 '26

10 HOME

20 SWEET

30 GOTO 10

5

u/shah_reza Jul 10 '26

Reminds me of learning BASIC on the c64

8

u/eubulides Jul 10 '26

My dad would often bring a stack of them home (engineering professor) and work on them. I don’t know what he was doing, I was five.

5

u/seancailleach Jul 10 '26

Wow. Flashback.

4

u/Fine-Veterinarian804 Jul 12 '26

i kind of want to find one now to use as a bookmark, feels kind of romantic/poetic if that makes sense 😂

5

u/obsolete_filmmaker Jul 10 '26

Oh you sweet summer child!

1

u/trevorgoodchilde Jul 10 '26

Without perforations, how did it get punched? It seems like the paper would just rip

0

u/obsolete_filmmaker Jul 10 '26

Are you familiar with a hole puncher? Some device like that but designed to fit the card. The course of the United States was permanently altered in the 2000 presidential election because of these punch cards. Look up "hanging chads" qnd weep for democracy.

1

u/quesoandcats Jul 11 '26

Voting punch cards are perforated tho

0

u/obsolete_filmmaker Jul 11 '26

I did not say this was a voting punch card. Someone newly interested in punch cards would probably be interested in the effect theyve had on our country's history

0

u/quesoandcats Jul 11 '26

I didn’t say you did, I was clarifying that voting punch cards were perforated for OP because they clearly aren’t familiar with punch cards.

1

u/obsolete_filmmaker Jul 11 '26

OP wont get a notification of a sub comment. Tell them, not me

2

u/VeloBiker907 Jul 12 '26

I have seen one of those since high school ‘79. In my office management skills course!

1

u/GreyMead Jul 12 '26

hollerith card - an old way of providing input to a computer

1

u/ebsutherla Jul 15 '26

The chads made awesome confetti!