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Virtual Punch Card Creator

by eniac111 on 3/7/25, 9:15 PM with 17 comments

• by timonoko on 3/8/25, 9:05 AM

  Nothing fun about cards. I had my Fortran exercise in a backpack when I bicycled to to Finnish government computer centre. It was raining, so the cards turned little bit mushy and jammed the machine.

  Sabotage and high treason, basically.

• by masswerk on 3/10/25, 8:05 AM

  BTW: This is from 2012.

  There's also a corresponding card reader to interpret these cards: https://www.masswerk.at/cardreader/

  This was a spin-off of a now long defunct custom Google search interface. Compare (while Google closed their public search API in 2016, there are a few cached search results available; users of a certain age may also try "list games"): https://www.masswerk.at/google60/

• by nils-m-holm on 3/8/25, 2:19 PM

  Here is a postscript file that generates punch card images: http://t3x.org/lfn/punchcard.eps

  Context: http://t3x.org/lfn/index.html

• by masswerk on 3/8/25, 8:00 AM

  There's also a more advanced version that lets you experience the joys of punch-card programming with modern languages (JS, Perl, Python (mostly Python2)):

  https://www.masswerk.at/card-readpunch/

  (Demo-stacks are available for download on the landing page.)

• by ChrisArchitect on 3/7/25, 9:53 PM

  Fun.

  Related:

  Tristan Davey's Punch Card Archive

  https://punchcards.tristandavey.com/

• by amenghra on 3/10/25, 1:19 PM

  If you are into punchcards, I wrote a multipart blog post about recovering and running some 40-years old code which was originally on punch tape.

  See https://www.quaxio.com/kaleidoscope_part1/

• by teddyh on 3/10/25, 2:13 PM

  bcd(6)

  <https://manpages.debian.org/bookworm/bsdgames/bcd.6.en.html>

• by MisterTea on 3/10/25, 1:25 PM

  Next up is a virtual punch card dropper where you play the equivalent of 52 card pickup but with more cards and they must be shuffled in-order. Fun for all ages.

• by mncharity on 3/10/25, 6:02 PM

  What I remember most is the sound[1][2]. chunk chunk chunk chunk

  [1] typing after a restoration https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWLptl0cKSc&list=PL-_93BVApb... [2] normal fast typing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnnGbcM-H8c&t=28s

• by thih9 on 3/10/25, 10:42 AM

  It’s possible to draw a heart:

      /KCDEOXOEDCK/
  

  Wider:

      /KLCDDENOXONEDDCLK/

• by GnarfGnarf on 3/10/25, 11:38 AM

  It is possible to store three decimal digits as three groups of four bits, in every 12-row column.

  You can insert and delete when duplicating cards, by pressing with your fingers on the source or target card while typing on the keyboard.

• by teddyh on 3/10/25, 2:23 PM

  It’s missing a card reader to jam by feeding your lace card into it.

• by acrophiliac on 3/10/25, 8:00 PM

  Oh my gosh, the flashbacks this triggered. It was the audio that did it. Amazing.