I had Supper with my grandparents tonight and had a great conversation with my Grandfather. He retired from IBM in the 80's and was talking about the punch card system and how it worked. He then decided to get some of the things out that he saved from IBM when he worked there. For a while he was involved in printing the punch cards for different companies. Here is one of the plates from his time there. He said he can't find it but said he has one for a GM punch card also. Just found it interesting and thought I would share a picture of the drum. I hope he finds the one for the GM punch card.

 

I had not thought about punch cards in a long time. I worked at a bank in the mid to late 70's and they had an entire department that was just women doing keypunch. It was a very inefficient system that generated lots of wasted paper since most of the cards were thrown away. They never thought about recycling in those days. The bank had an IBM 360 and an IBM 370 which were state of the art at the time.

 

Imagine trying to engrave all of the exacting details on such a small cylinder - probably acid etched on as opposed to 'stock removal' but that is just a guess.

Any engravers on Classicoldsmobile.com that could enlighten us on the process of making these dies?

HM

 

At Emory business school, we had a computer that took up a whole room that used punch cards, At the time they had a national competition of "Computer games" which had students from all over come in and 'on computer' manage a flat ware business making all their decisions on punch cards. It "was" state of the art in late 60's