I used those steel rulers for much of my career repairing forms handling equipment aka FHE. The small holes of the scale could be laid over a metal tractor chain pins, which my company had patents on. IBM was a customer for those chains for their impact printers. The rulers were used to check for stretched tractor chains. These tractor chains were used to pull continuous fan-fold forms with matching holes every half an inch into: line printers, decollators, deleavers, detachers and many other types of after-writing forms processing equipment. The paper was often referred to as green bar paper. The chains were held together with rivet pins similar to a bicycle chain. The problem is as they wear out, the rivet pin ends wear down and the holes they fit into the sides of the chain also wear, then the entire chain starts stretching causing all kinds of problems, mostly paper jams, as the paper would stick to the out-of-tolerance tractor pins which were now more than a half an inch apart. The chains also drooped more when they were worn. There were tensioner guides, but once you exceeded that half an inch spec by too many hundreds of an inch the chain had to be replaced and realigned with the adjacent chain on the opposite side. Decollators were next used to separate multi-part continuous forms into separate form stacks. One stack may be retained by the billing dept., another by the shipping dept., another would go to the warehouse, usually the bottom-most sheet that had the worst print quality was sent to the customer as a packing list for example. The forms originally used carbon interleaved paper when I first started working on them and it also had to be extracted during the decollating process, coiled up and discarded. Later an encapsulated paper coating technology was developed when the print head struck the form it transferred the impact through multiple layers where chemical A on the backside mixed with chemical B the front side of a sheet of paper forming an ink image. You could actually watch this development process take place over several seconds. This tech was also patented and was called cleanprint or carbonless paper. Most customers used three or four layer continuous forms, but the Govt used as many as eight layers of paper at one point during the seventies and eighties. The US Govt loves its paper. With carbon paper no matter how hard you set the printer to strike, the two bottom layers were fuzzy, faint and hard to read. On an 8-part forms with carbon that is 15 layers of paper! I don't think there are any printers left powerful enough to use 8-part paper. Detachers used tractor chains to pull the decollated layers in one layer or stack at a time. They used a set of slow rollers to feed the paper under a breaker bar, which had to be set to the correct form depth. When say 11 inches of paper was fed in, a set of high speed rollers would snatch the end and stretch the paper and the perforation against a dull breaker bar, or a set of knuckles. They did not use guillotine blades (too slow and the timing was too critical). The breaker bar usually had three dull points that contacted the perforation and would cause it to break and tear from the center out to each side edge. Single point blades were used on narrow tab cards. This process was all patented. Some larger detachers could also separate IBM cards aka tab cards at very high speeds up to 600 feet of tab cards per minute. Tab cards being detached sounded like a machine gun firing at that feed rate. Short length materials like 3 x 5 cards also ran very fast, whereas the detacher had to be slowed down on 8.5, 11 and 14 inch long legal sized forms. One local University used a 22" long registration form that ran real slow and required a custom-built detacher to handle it each new Fall semester. The detachers were considered to be a final step in forms processing and they often had margin trimmers to cut the sprocket holes off the side of the sheets. When their tractor chains got stretched, they would suffer trim jams where the trim would wrap around the tractor chains and jam the slitter blades and make a huge mess. Often 1-inch steel shafts were twisted into cork screws. It kept me busy. One other interesting factoid was that the tractor chain pins for decollators had to be smaller in diameter, because you were dealing with multiple layers of paper laid down and crimped together on a printing press. The holes in four layer forms never aligned perfectly. Large pins would stick in these slightly offset holes causing jams. The detachers aka bursters used wider pins that fit the sprocket holes in the paper almost exactly, because they were designed to work with only single fan-fold layers. Although we always had customers that wanted to burst multipart forms on our detachers. The solution was to install decollator tractor chains as the two chains were both the same length and were interchangeable. The smaller pins would reduce the accuracy of the margin trimmers on single part forms. They caused the trimmed edge cuts to weave slightly as the forms could drift side to side more. Then the customers would complain about the uneven slitting. Oh well! It was a long and interesting career for 42 years. As the fan-fold business died with the introduction of enterprise laser printers, my company moved into heat seal and pressure sealed business forms.
I do love the way it starts by describing a now obsolete and to a modern viewer obscure piece of office equipment, to then quickly run through 200+ years of data processing history.
I have just discovered your channel. Many years ago(I am 81 years old), I had a pitney boes (sp) postage machine. I decided that I didn't have a need for it anymore. I wrote the company asking them to pick up their machine. My letter apparently got lost, and I continued to get a bill each month. After writing them several more letters, I continued getting monthly bills. The bills came on a punch card and you were suppose to return your payment along with the punch card. Finally, I bent, folded and mutilated the punch card and wrote on it "see my letter of such date", and mailed the card back to the company. I never got another bill from the company(also, they never sent somebody to pick up the machine either).
In the summer of 1984 I got a summer job at an insurance company headquarters, and operated an "OP-EX" (Open-Extract) machine. It would slice open the top of the envelope, and pause, then I would pull out the return form and check, upon which the conveyor cycled, dumping the empty envelope into a bin and bringing up the next one. Meanwhile I stacked the two pieces of paper on the proper stack. Any kind of letter included has no place in the process. It says as much on the form (it was a bit past Hollerith cards), "do not include correspondence...". So it could be worse than just ignoring the letter: it could prevent the bill from being paid, if the whole package was forwarded to the manager to be forgotten.
As a high school student in the 70s I worked at a local university as a computer operator, reading in card programs for mostly graduate school students. The students often had several boxes of cards all color coded on the tops in hand drawn ink and color and different hatch marks denoting various sections of the program. One student was always rude and demanding so we made a mock up of his cards all color coded the same way. One day he was in an especially foul mode and the operator took the fake program and HEAVED it across the counter, spreading in randomly across the room. Rude student looked like he was having a heart attack as his dissertation research was destroyed. The operator just smiled and handed him is perfectly fine Genuine program. Rude student took the hint and actually became a good guy helping us out in peak times.
I work with IBM Mainframe systems and while the machines themselves barely resemble their predecessors from the '70s, those fixed 80 character records are still used all throughout the system and still commonly referred to as "cards". While actual card stock isn't usually used anymore, the hard- and software are still perfectly capable of addressing card readers, automatic punches and line printers. In fact, it isn't uncommon to see code that very likely was read in from actual cards still running today, neatly integrated with far more modern development.
When I started programming computers, IBM 1401s to be precise, the first 80 characters of storage were allocated to the card reader. To load a program in, a series of three bootstrap cards were loaded into this area, and a program was run which then loaded the rest of the deck in, hence, booting a computer. The 360 system used to call it IPL, though.
@@suntexi I mostly deal with IMS (the ancestor of document oriented databases and a management engine for stateless programs), so it's been a while since I actually did an IPL, but as usual for mainframes, the terminology has stuck. Modern mainframes are something of an odd world, retaining a lot of technology for backward compatibility even to the early 1960s, yet also providing most of what developers have come to expect from today's more common platforms - all of this on some ridiculously oversized hardware that a single OS can't even handle. There has been hardware virtualization built in since the '70s to fix that and it's been possible (and common) to configure the system as a high availability cluster since the '90s.
Ahh yes. I worked for IBM 1998-2004. So many terms and acronyms that were different to the rest of the industry. IPL (initial program load) rather than booting. People really did say "I'll just IPL it". DASD (direct access storage device) or sometimes "hardfile" instead of hard drive. ABEND (abnormal end) instead of crash. And the ones associated with software development like APAR, PTF, FFST. Was completely baffling for the first few weeks, and I'd been around computers for quite a while before I started at IBM. Oh, and I wasn't even working in the mainframe or AS400 worlds, would have been much more confusing over there!
@@DavidMonro It took me a while to get most of the jargon out of my comments, that's for sure... And I haven't been around mainframes for long enough to forget how much my coworkers sounded like they were talking in a foreign language at first. Now, I know that I'm quite guilty of doing the exact same thing myself.
Former COBOL programmer here. Never had to deal with punch cards, but remnants of the punch card age were present everywhere. Column No 8 is where labels and section names go, instructions start at col 12, anything beyond col 72 is a comment and col 7 may hold a line divider if needed.
Another important use of unit records equipment in WWII was for tracking troop movements and reporting casualties. IBM machines were responsible for getting mail to soldiers wherever they were. My father (an IBM employee before and after his army service) was CO of a Machine Records Unit (MRU) in Italy during the war; he said the only day there were no casualties to report was Christmas, and he suspected that the COs of the reporting units had delayed their reports for the benefit of the survivors. I was an AutoCoder-IOCs programmer for IBM for one summer during college. My job was to create programs for an IBM 1401 (a room-sized computer) to replicate the functions of the unit records machines taking up most of the floor I worked on (so they could be eliminated). I wrote the programs on forms pads, where they went to KP to be punched into cards to feed into the 1401's card reader, with output on huge line printers.
Great video. My dad used to work at a bank and I remember having IBM punch cards at the house. I never understood what my dad was trying to explain, what they were for and how they worked.
My grandpa once admitted that taking a card out of the stack and putting it somewhere else in the stack was the best way to troll the computer science students in college. That seems like a use.
I really enjoyed this stroll down memory lane. My first real job (I was in High School) was approx 1970 working with computers and punch cards, initially as an assistant to the operators, but later as a programmer. I had one of these rulers, it's probably still around here in my huge pile of nostalgia, somewhere. The group (what would today be the IT department) had about a dozen keypunches (with operators) and a full set of tab machines in addition to the computer. The eldest of the programmers had started before the computers, when the department store's own credit card records and billing was all done on punch cards and tabulating machines, and I loved listening to his stories from back then.
I grew up in the 70's and 80's and we'd get boxes of punch cards to use in art projects from the local government offices. Not sure if they were becoming obsolete by that point or not.
My career spanned the eras of punch cards, punched paper tape, mag drum, mag core, mag tape, mag disk, and solid state. With both types of punch devices, in both civilian and military use, I never hear the bin that collected the waste products from punching called anything other than the "chad box". It was never called a bit bucket. The term bit bucket occurred much later and from the first was a purely mythical object where missing binary digits (bits) went to die. It could be used to haze newbies by asking them to clean out the bit bucket, just as green recruits in the air force were sent for a "bucket of prop wash" (the gust of wind caused by a propeller), or auto mechanics apprentices sent to the store for "blinker fluid".
Silly boy, EVERYone knows that only BMW mechanics need ‘blinker fluid’ And everyone knows that blinker fluid is needed to keep the blinkers from rusting, because BMW drivers are barred from using blinkers due to the NDA the buyers sign when purchasing a BMW.
And the ubiquitous engineering newbie trials of being sent to stores for a long weight (long wait) or a tin of rainbow or striped paint. The store men were always in on it, and obliged.
The 1/12 was not used by engineers, or anybody in business, to do 1inch to the foot scale drawings. Such drawings would be done with engineering rules - the triangular ones. Model makers commonly use a 1/12 scale, but again, wouldn't use one of these form rules. The 1/12 & 1/6 scales are for printing-press printing. 1/6" is a "pica" - a standard unit in printing. A pica divided by 12 is a "point" - commonly used to describe type sizes (but that's not relevant here).
I learned a pica typewriter is twelve spaces per inch and an elite typewriter is ten spaces per inch. The IBM selectric had pica & elite type heads plus a switch to change the type pitch...
@@mdj.6179 - I was coming here to say that, but I thought it was the other way around? I thought "pica" was 10 per inch, and "elite" was 12 per inch. But it's been a long time, I might be remembering wrong. (Nope, I just looked - Wikipedia has an article on "typewriter pitch", and it says: The most widespread fonts in typewriters are 10 and 12 pitch, called Pica and Elite, respectively. Both fonts have the same x-height, yielding six lines per vertical inch. There may be other font styles with various width: condensed or compressed (17-20 cpi), italic or bold (10 pitch), enlarged (5-8 cpi), and so on. Pica, the typewriter font, should not be confused with pica, a unit equal to 1⁄6 of an inch or twelve points, usually measured vertically.
10 cpi and 12 cpi were common alternate character widths. 12 characters per inch on 11 inch paper gives 132 columns which was the other common line printer width during this era
Well I agree with the first paragraph I think the second is semi accurate. While the pica divided into 12 points may lead to the current computer standard of setting a type size to 12 points, on typewriters 10 per inch was pica and 12 per inch was elite. I still own a Smith Corona portable that is elite at 12 characters to the inch and in the past I owned an IBM Selectric that had adjustable spacing to 10 or 12 characters per inch as labeled on the typing ball..
I still have a number of these scales from the late 70's when I started as a programmer at General Tire. They were invaluable in laying out new reports. An anecdote that old folks will recall is that column 1 of a report was used for carriage control. We had an IBM 3800 laser printer that printed on the order of 13,000 lines a minute. Invariably tyro Fortran programmers would screw up and use column one for data. I managed to screw up a program that went into a loop printing lines of zeroes which was doubly bad because a zero in column 1 told the printer to go to a new page! The next morning I came into the office to find 20 boxes of printout with exactly 1 zero on the first line of the page. That gem resulted in me buying donuts for the three shifts of operators in the computer room. They all found it hilarious, my boss, not so much!
WONDERFUL!....brilliant overview. I started my career in computing in the days of the quite challenging hand card punch, a fearsome machine to master at other than the speed of a snail!
Absolutely fantastic! When this video started I pulled out my corresponding ruler to follow along. Same shape, but advertising "Moore Business Forms, Inc.", instead. I already knew about a few of the special scales, but had no idea about the holes matching up with printers' feed sprockets, nor the 1/12 scale for scaling drawings, nor the spacing for the original Hollerith cards. One thing you didn't mention was that the 1/12 scale had larger 1/6" spacing. That was used, in my Dad's office at least, to identify rows on pages from the line printers that were set for 6 lines per inch vertically. Used, of course, along with the 1/10" scale for horizontal spacing. This video made it interesting for this 70+ year-old to reminisce about some of the havoc he wreaked in his Dad's office as an adolescent in the '60s! (Details withheld in the interest of brevity and protecting the guilty party.)
I've had one of these rulers for decades. The original owner gave it to me when I started wood working and I never knew, until now, exactly what all of the graduations were originally used for. The gifter did indeed work in a printing shop. Excellent explanation of a long forgotten item...I've only used this 18" flexible ruler, as a straight edge...lol
Enjoyed your review of technology I used in my career with IBM from 1960s - 2005. I still use my ibm ruler with all the different scales and holes. I also have one of IBM’s early remote (person powered) data entry device about 8x11” and an inch thick. It had a drawer with blank prescored cards that slid one at a time under a template overlay showing the meaning of each hole and what to enter in each column on the card. Ie medical intake form Another popular application was with toll Highway use - Toll plaza info, exit on off, class vehicle, time entered and time exit from the toll highway. Also serial numbers on cards to control theft of funds. A metal stylus was used to hand punch the desired hole. Then the completed card was slid in a second drawer to be turned in later. Accuracy of data entered was so much better than being transcribed from hand written notes. The person that cared the most about the accuracy of the data entered the data And the data entered was available sooner. I still use the back of punch cards for grocery lists Just the right size for a shirt pocket.
My father worked for IBM first as a field service tech, and later as a machine operator. IBM retrained him when his knees gave out. This was back when IBM was a good company to work for. Anyway I have his No. 6062 ruler. Its just like the one featured in this video, which I greatly enjoyed.
@@SeattlePioneer I understand what happened during 1992 that time was for the company survival. I remember being in a meeting when a corporate exec told all of us to look left then right. Two of the three would be reassigned or gone within two years. It happened and those that remained had more responsibility and were better paid. The company transformed. It was the first time there were ever layoffs in IBMs history.
The best description of Hollerith tabulation machines ever, all videos and books treat them as a footnote, it was the first time I learned about the relay system, the plug board and the exchangeable pre wireble plug boards. Very well done video. Thanks. The classic "I am not a number is Number 6 in The Prisoner opening that shows a punched card about him being put of a card drawer for "Resigned". PS finally I know the reason fro that big button in mainframes"
Now do one on the flowcharting template, a large rectangular piece of tinted (usually green) translucent plastic, with graph-paper style cross-hatched lines printed on the back, rulers on the long sides to count 10 per inch card columns and print columns and 8 per inch interpreter print columns (a machine that could be wired with a plugboard to print, at 60 characters per card, information punched in cards into specific positions between punch rows, to use the card as a “turnaround” document, such as a bill or check). But the heart of the template was an assortment of larger holes of various shapes, punched into the interior, for drawing steps in a flowchart. All of these features together were used to diagram, by hand, the flow of data from one machine or program to another, or the flow of logic in a single program. The short edges even had cutouts for curly brackets. Every programmer or systems analyst had one of those in their desk.
I inherited an entire E-size flat file drawer full of such templates from my predecessor who was still doing things by hand in 2012 when I took over his duties and promptly digitized everything.
I recall my flowchart template was tinted orange. But that does indeed bring back memories of the start of my IT career (before it was even called IT) back in the mid 1970's
i recall learning the flowchart symbols in college courses. To this day, I cringe when I see the wrong symbols being used or the lines going every which way.
As an interesting side note. The loom weaving cards were not liked by the textile workers as it put certain positions out of business. In revolt the workers attempted to interrupt the looms by throwing their shoes (wooden, I think) into the workings of the loom. Their shoes, called sabots (sp?) gave rise to the new word sabotage.
I recommend reading "Blood in the Machine" which meticulously documents the original tech revolt you refer to and compares it to the today's nascent tech revolts against companies like Uber and Amazon. That book radically changed my view of the term "luddite".
In the early 80's the university I went to was still using punch cards for student registration. You ran around a big auditorium gathering up punch cards for all the classes you wanted. One punch card per class. And there were only as many punch cards for a class as the room could hold. So that also handled enforcing limits on class size. Then you turned those in with your master registration card and a couple other cards I don't know what they did when you left the auditorium. The staff just added them to the stack of cards and when registration closed they ran the whole stack of cards through the computer. We Comp Sci students never worried too much about class size limits though or getting there early to get the desirable classes. The format for how a class was represented was easy to work out, and we had an unlimited supply of cards and of course full access to the keypunch machines. And there were always a few students that didn't make it to class every session or had dropped the class so having too many people show up wasn't really a problem. The profs could see they had more students registered than they should, but most of them smiled on that as it showed initiative and ambition.
As a total vintage-IBM nerd I still managed to learn something new from this! Never heard of punch card -optimized rulers before. Absolutely delighted 😄 Also; a very tasteful choice of a tie, especially since not doing any sorting or collating while wearing it!
I'd known this history *in summary* (not in this detail), and keypunched my own programs in my day, but still found your presentation fascinating. And it's true that you could branch into endless side stories about things like edge-notched cards, the paper tape that was another successor to Jacquard's cards, various means of reading either as well as pencil-marked papers, or details of the electric automation that grew up ahead of and later alongside the digital ways of handling punched cards. I'd seen at least one of those business rulers, but never looked close enough to make those connections.
I just discovered your channel. Very interesting! In this case, I remember all of this - and more, about early "data processing." I started my career in the early 1970s with punch cards and tabulating machines, sorters, keypunches, and so on. One item I would like to point out on the forms ruler is the inches divided into sixths. While it may have been used for blueprints, I had never heard of that. We used the 6th scale in conjunction with the tenths scale for determining the size of a form. Yes, line printers were universally in a 10 cpi scale (characters per inch) with the typical printer being 132 characters. The green bar paper was 11" x 14-7/8', including the tractor holes. That was horizontal spacing. Verticle spacing was 6 lpi (lines per inch). Thus, at 11', you could get 66 lines per standard green bar paper. This rarely was done with normal green bar. Depending upon the setup, there were blank lines allowed at the top and bottom for readability. I recall green bar being printed with an inch at the top and maybe a half-inch at the bottom. This paper can still be purchased online. However, custom forms were very common. Every kind of business form from checks (cheques) to postcards to you name it, existed. This is why we needed these steel rulers to design the forms accurately before cases of the new forms were printed. Since there were so many forms, you might ask, how does the printer "know" where a form starts and stops? The lengths can be quite different. Much like the Jacquard loom, there was a continuous paper tape, punched with holes, to tell the printer where TOF (top of form) was located. When we changed form types in the printer, we often had to change what was called the "carriage control tape." This defined the top, and in some cases, certain fields on the form. For example, rather than have the printer "step" downward to the "Total" area that was always the same on this form, on the bottom, the carriage control tape would allow the printer to skip directly to the total line. This saved time, and if you were printing 100,000 forms, that couple of seconds added up. Later editions of line printers had a virtual carriage control tape that could be programmed into the printer. How those printers worked is amazing in itself. There were fixed-type bar printers (early on). Later, there were chain printers and train printers. Finally, laser printers that are blindly fast. It got to the point where you fed paper in one end and had a bound book come out the other. Thanks for a great video!
3:00 Having sixths of an inch is also for measuring lines on the page. 26:13 tie caught in card reader: Maybe that's the first person who was elegized with, "He was burred the next day, face down, nine edge first."
outstanding content. shows how extremely important invention is to society progression.we stand on the shoulders of those that came and suffered long before us.
I still have a couple of those rulers, and yes I used them for several of the things they were designed for. I used coding forms and had keypunch operators who would turn my coding into cards which were fed into the computer. I also presided over the change to coding at terminals where I worked and that did indeed create a huge improvement in productivity. One legacy of punch cards I never hear people speak about is the addition of slash marks to Alphabetic characters in order to clearly distinguish them from the numeric characters they too closely resembled. That many terminal manufacturers got that backwards and put a dot or slash into the numeric 0 instead of the alpha O was always annoying because you always slashed the Z not the 2 and the S not the 5. All irrelevant now but of great importance once.
In my freshman year of college, we used punch cards. We were required to put a blank line above and below the comments in our Fortran programs. The "C" cards were especially valuable later as note cards, as the entire back (after the C) was free of annoying rectangular holes. The back of the 132 column fan fold paper was useful as large scratch paper. I recently found a ream at an estate sale and got it for a few bucks. Now I have a lifetime supply! Still use a steel rular as you are describing in my wood shop. Usually only the 32's of an inch scale however. thank you for explaining the rest of the scales!
I had no idea what a nerd I was until I realized that I had just sat there, spellbound: fascinated, until I had watched the duration of this entire video. Thanks for your research and effort. You've earned this thumbs up and a new subscriber!
I have one at home. Got it from a company that created chain paper. We use it to create order fomts and the like. Still use it as it is a metal ruler. Love your explanation on the punchcards
I remember a couple of those in the computer lab at my college in the mid 90s. Can still hear the noise! I probably still have guitar tablature (found on the early internet) printed on the green and white paper around somewhere. Also ripping off the perforated margins.
I remember being called in to fix/unjam them in primary school, since I was the only one around who knew how to do it. I was eight years old. Even the teachers didn't know how to fix them, and felt it was easier to pull me out of class to do it than learn it themselves. To this day, unjamming printers is a major job skill, because my employers refuse to fully embrace the 20th century. They still run a goddamn mainframe!
Brilliant! You remind me of a professor, his fascinating and eye-opening lectures were about the influence of technology on social behaviour. Thank you!
I still have one of those rulers. It was a promotional giveaway that I got back in the 1980s from a long-defunct company called Inmac. I knew that some of the holes lined up with the holes on tractor-feed printer paper but I had no idea what some of the other markings were for! Thanks for making this video!
I was a pressman for over 30 years and I have several rulers like this of different sizes from several different eras of the printing industry including ones for setting different sized metal type, setting up letter presses for business and greeting cards, blueprints, stting up the lazer prints for four color offset presses, archetecture, many different kinds of rulers and guides including a couple for different sizes and styles of punch cards and anylitical machines, setting up printing presses for printing raffle tcickets and even a 40 inch one with a beveled edge and guide marks for checking and separating sheets of the old paper food stamps.
The near Strangled To Death story: This is why you see people Not Wearing ties or necklaces around moving machinery!!! (or if you're wearing something around your neck it either is clip-on (like a tie) or has a "break-away" joint, so the machine gets it and not you!)
Just shows how dangerous ties could be. I know of one instance where my manager leant over a printer which consumed his tie. The assistant manager had to find a pair of scissors to free him. Thank goodness, ties are going the same way as punched cards. And business suits.
You would often see technical staff, in places where ties were ubiquitous, with their ties pushed inside their shirts so they didn't dangle into anything dangerous. I got my aversion to ties from such places. My philosophy on ties is that they should never be worn if you are dealing with moving equipment, liquids, fire, high voltages, low static requjrements, or are generally clambering around on things. Ties have a life of their own, and are always getting into places they shouldn't be😊
It baffles me why wearing a coloured insanitary noose is a great fashion statement. Ties are filthy, germ-laden strips of cloth which are a penis-substitute and share one's urine.@@crabby7668
I have one of those rulers because I wanted one with 1/32" markings and not just the standard 1/16" found on most 12" rulers. I never knew or cared what the holes and text were about so thanks for educating me about this interesting history!
Amazing information, starting with a question of what do these numbers mean on this ruler? Into the birth of punchcard technology through its history and devolopment all the way into the start of digital data storage. Its truly amazing how you can go over such a broad space of time and yet still touch on all the steps and advancements of the topic in such detail. I have only recently discovered this channel and i must say your content is great, you cover things i would have otherwise never known about or how signifigant a role they played in not only its time but how it lead to the amazing technology of today.
Great video! I have one of these rulers. Have used it all my life (and still do). My mother once explained the features to me but I was too young. My mother worked with these at her job before she was married.
Interesting connection with Babbage's Analytical Engine was Lady Ada Lovelace who is now considered the first programmer. She was the daughter of a "scandalous" gentleman according to 1812ish London society.....🙂 Thanks for very interesting articles. Cheers from Comox Valley.
I used to work with punched tape as recently as 2004-2006. It was a CNC machine tool with Fanuk-6M numerical control system. We had both a tape reader and a puncher.
The one and only computer class I had to take in college in the late 70s required writing simple programs on punch cards. The entire process back then was tedious.
In 1977 I was assigned a project while on medical hold. I was taken to a single wide trailer full of parts for an electronics repair department. My job was to punch out the IBM cards using a ten key keyboard with the part identifying number and the cabinet shelf and bin location to inventory the trailer. As new parts came in we, there were two of us assigned, we updated the cards. (making new ones). They then went on to be sorted and used to print out on a line printer the inventory that a tech could read to find the parts he/she needed. To this day my fingers ache when I see an old punch card.
I worked as an IBM mainframe programmer in the 80s and 90s. While punch cards weren't being used much by then, there were still a lot of them laying around. One of the more obscure uses for them was to staple the short end together in a circle on one end, lightly folding over the other end of each card and stapling its to itself forming a point, and then spray painting the whole thing green to make a Christmas wreath.
Used to do that with tv guides fold a corner to the middle every page staple front to back and a facsimile of a tree spray paint green and ornaments Christmas tree. Back when American was wholesome. 55 years ago
6:25 - there are still places where these are still in use. I visited Hanoi maybe 10 years ago and part of the tour was a textile weaving district, where they wove (IIRC) silk cloth. The looms - who knows how old they were - used punched cards exactly like this. I used punched cards when I took my first programming course circa 1981 or 82 (CDC6600, FORTRAN 4) - there were stacks and stacks of them free for the taking (I used them for taking notes, for shopping lists, shimming up table legs, etc.), banks of card punches with keyboards (and people waiting to use them), line printers for output (with people hanging around for their jobs to complete and print), card readers (with people waiting in line to submit their stacks of cards), a room full of half-forgotten machines, which turned out to be card sorters, card printers and card duplicators, and big recycling bins for cards with mistakes and printouts of computer jobs that quit halfway due to bugs. It all went away in the space of about 3-4 years - actual computer terminals and actual electronic files stored somewhere seemed a huge improvement, as did floppy discs and PCs a few years later.
A few years ago, on a trip to Venice, Italy, we had a tour of a velvet brocade weaving company. They hand-weave using very fine silk thread. The hand looms date from that early 1800's Jacquard invention era because modern power looms put too much tension on the threads and break them. They have the original Jacquard card apparatus on top of the looms controlling the mechanism. They said that at the time Napoleon took over Venice, the French shut down their business because it was competition for French weavers. The building was locked. When the French were driven out, the door was unlocked and they resumed. They said that the addition of the Jacquard mechanism increased loom production from 10 cm per day to 30 cm per day. They have a library of all the patterns they have ever produced, but have to re-punch and thread new copies if they get an order to re-do an old job because the cards deteriorate.
Thanks for this fascinating history of this ruler. I actually found one of these rulers in a Goodwill just a few days ago and was wondering what all the markings and holes were for. I do paper crafts (junk journals mostly) and am always looking for helpful tools and papers, ledgers, etc. When I saw this for $0.99 and it was so interesting, I had to buy it. I searched for the name on it (UARCO) to see if I could find out more about it. You came through and it was way more interesting that I thought it would be!
Excellent work! I would never have guessed that behind the mild-mannered Business Forms Ruler lay stories of the line printer, Jacquard loom, Babbage analytical engine, Hollerith census tabulator, IBM, and the humble 80-column punch card.
"100 CONTINUE" - card was the master card. It was so common in freshmen's Fortran programs that there was a bin in Helsinki Polytechnic for slightly used "100 CONTINUE"-cards.
I have one of those metal rulers in my desk at home. I used it at work in the later half of the 1970s on into the 1980s. As long as green-bar, fan-fold paper was used for any printing that ruler came in handy for verifying the alignment of a report on the paper. For the 10 or 12 units per inch, if you're old enough, you may remember typewriters had essentially two "fonts". "Pica" at 10 per inch and "Elite" at 12 per inch.
capn - Yes, I remember and I have used all of that for programming (Fortran, Basic, Cobol, PL/1, etc.) and for report design spacing. I have two of the rulers still today.
I still have one. Mine was given to me by my forms salesman from Uarco. (in 1988 Uarco was acquired by its competitor, Standard Register, the source of your ruler. Mine has a scale for estimating the number of punched cards. Those of us that designed punched card applications had a good friend who was the forms salesman. My family had a baby-grand player piano. Hollerith called his machine a "tabulator" because it created "tables." I had been using tabulators for decades without knowing why it was called that. Tables, printouts, were the primary form of output for data processing systems for fifty years.
I knew about most of the computing side, but the part about bills, cheques, ID cards, etc being punch cards was never something I’d heard before yet instantly made perfect sense. Everything which had a mag stripe growing up, or a chip and/or RFID unit more recently, would’ve had card punch holes back then. Of course! - no institution that wanted to computerise their records was going to wait for magnetic tape technology to get mature/cheap enough for a stripe on a card, even if it was only 10-20 years away!
I still have mine, used in the mid-80s to design a data-entry form for a new system. I took it home with me when they canceled the project. We referred to those printers as "green bar printers."
Do you work from a script? Because your flow of information and manner of speaking suggest you don't, which is amazing to listen to. I had a history professor once in university who was very old and experienced and he would come into class and basically tell a very detailed story for 80 minutes and it was fascinating to listen to every week. Never worked off of a book. Just talked straight, hit names and dates and key significances. I enjoyed it immensely even though I had to take notes at warp speed the whole class.
Well, yes and no. I don't read off a teleprompter, but I do rehearse a basic "script" of sorts before going in front of the camera. Unfortunately, I am only very rarely able to get the whole thing out in one go, either because I flub words, lose my train of thought, or come up with a better way of saying something. Thus, nearly all of my videos involve a large number of takes, the best of which make it into the video. You've likely noticed the large number of fades between segments to hide the cuts.
@@CanadianMacGyver Yeah, but still it's so much more engaging to watch than some creators who read straight off a teleprompter. Keep up the amazing work.
@@oldmandoinghighkicksonlyin1368I'm really curious - was this professor's last name Black, by any chance? Yeah, weird coincidence as I had a history prof in college who did exactly the same thing. Never used the course textbook, just picked up where he left off last time and continued the narrative at warp speed. And I loved it, as I was pretty fast with taking notes, and the way he would relate many strange details about historical figures and events (often things that no sane textbook writer would ever consider including) made the whole experience so much more fascinating. Best history course I ever took.
@@usaturnuranus I don't remember his name--it was 20 years ago. It was at the University of Ottawa. I took three European history classes with him (covering 1500CE to 1900CE)He looked like the quintessential history professor: tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, turtleneck, about 70 years old, cantankerous, balding with a bushy white fringe. He also had that those 1970's Soviet-era eyeglasses. Like you, each class was a joy of furious note-taking. I wish I had learned stenography for that class. Laptops were around but I'm fairly certain if I brought one in and started typing on it, he would've told me to close it and get out of his class. He inspired me to take other history classes as electives, but it just wasn't the same with other professors who used PowerPoint presentations and talked about subjects I was interested in. If he was the only professor that taught history at my university, I would've minored in it.
>>Very entertaining! As a Graduate Teaching Assistant more years ago than a bit bucket could collect, I taught some of this stuff, and I am delighted to learn more from a whippersnapper like you. >>Best of luck in the Matrix, HA! >>Respectfully, NHG
Interesting how IBM wanted to have exclusivity on punch cards. We see that now with K-cups, ink jets and even label printers where they use digital rights management to lock a user in to using only 'official' expendables.
I started programming in 1963 at which time I received a forms ruler. It is in my desk at home today. I still use it on occasion to draw straight lines and measure things in tenths of inches.
The Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation in Waltham, Mass. has 2 or 3 of these on display in the section of the museum devoted to measuring equipment and devices. Precision measurement is an important part of that city's industrial heritage. I was tickled to see that one of the rulers on display was the same as one that I had bought in yard sale and use regularly.
A little off topic, but I worked in a UPS administrative facility in the mid-80s as a tech geek. In one of the buildings there was a small-ish, windowed "office". Inside the "office" was a large wood and plexiglass cube - about 4 feet on a side. Inside the cube was a line printer "cage" that was about 3 feet on a side. The printer used green bar paper. When in use, the noise - a really fast BAM BAM BAM BAM - was almost unbearable if the printer cage was open. When closed, the noise was still considerable. Outside the "office" with the door closed, one could still hear a WHUMP WHUMP WHUMP almost anywhere in the building. Times change. 🙂
Memories! I have not seen mine since my last move, but I still have that marvelous little device used for punching the paper tapes we used on the IBM 1403 printers in the early 70s. BTW, beautiful Christmas wreaths could be made using punch cards.
Way late to the show, and it may have already been covered by another comment, but the 1/10" and 1/12" scales are for the two common typewriter pitches -- pica (10 characters per inch) and Elite (12 characters per inch). The 1/12" scale was not normally used for scale drawings.
Back in the 70s, I was a field service engineer for one of the mainframe companies. Our customer issued paychecks that were punch cards.We didn't punch them, but we did read them after they were cashed. Those cards were frequently folded and mutilated. The worst was that some places put fimgerprint stickers on the back of the checks. Those almost always jammed the card reader.
You mentioned punch cards for musical instruments. Especially dance/fairground organs made use of it since 1892 (book music patented by Gavioli, organ builder in Paris) and were processing the music data with pneumatic controlled air signals. In my opinion this was a missed opportunity building a computer as organ builder had all necessary tools and basics like 'and', 'or', 'not' or bistable switches made with pneumatic valves capable to operate at 5 Hz. Btw. very relyable lasting about 20 years with minimal maintanance made of wood, leather and some metal spring wire. If only Herman Hollerith would have looked inside such an organ at Coney Island. He would have switched to pneumatic. Around 1900 in Germany organ builders could read their books without physcal touching the 'book' just by air decompression when there is a hole in the cardboard playing tremolos up to 8 ticks per second.
I (thankfully) did not deal with punched cards. I programmed IBM "mid range" systems 34, 36 and 38 that used magnetic storage. I had IBM's version of this ruler. I used it constantly to program accounting systems to print forms like checks, statements, invoices, purchase orders, W2, W9, etc. I kept using it when we graduated from line printers to lasers and desktop computer networks. Thanks for reminding me about this tool, and educating everyone under 40 about automation before we all got supercomputers in our pocket.
Cool video. What a rabbit hole. I'm a few months younger than Bill Gates. At my high school in 1973 we had a computer lab. Big teletype type machines that we'd type Basic into to write programs. Type in the lines of code, hit Run, it worked or it didn't. Then we'd troubleshoot and run it again. Bill Gates was doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. Our school district decided we were using too much computer time so they made us instead make punch cards for our programs. I was never able to write another program that worked. The lesson here is that if you want your society to excel and lead the world then make your most advance equipment accessible as much as possible to your students. Who knows what might've happened had we been allowed to continue typing in our lines of Basic, or if this opportunity were made available nationwide. A few million bucks in the 1970s.... & I once bought a fabric shower curtain at Target because its label said it was made on a Jacquard loom. I absolutely could not resist. I've never had a fabric shower curtain before or since. Ada Lovelace would've approved.
When my brother first started working for Kennedy Space Center he was tasked with archiving the old space program data(Apollo,Skylab,Gemini,Mercury) . It was all on dot computer paper that was stored in an old blockhouse (and elsewhere). Much of it was damaged and data was lost .At the time they didn't have the ability to digitally copy the data off of dot paper . All of the individual dots ate up enormous amounts of memory .Later they were able to digitally copy/store just the text .
I had one of those in the '90s, because it had the 1/10" markings, to work out which column was which on the printouts. Also to draw lines (doh), but then the Operators started sword-fighting with them, and they chipped the heck out of the edges. And yes, I started programming with punchcards in the '80s.
When I took my first programming course in 1977 we wrote FORTRAN programs on green forms, these went to the punching department, where they were typed up and punched, by two ladies, actually. The first one punched the card, and the second one basically did the proofreading by typing it again against the card. The brogram was the run through the compiler and during the next lesson a week later we would get the printout, either as a list of compiler errors, or the output of the program. I probably still have a stack of cards around somewhere of the biorhythm program I wrote then... I also have memories of punchcards messing with an election...
The 1/6-inch markings were typically used vertically on the paper to represent the line spacing, because the printers normally printed at 6 lines per inch.
Several Comments As a computer science we would draw a diagonal line across the top of a card stack with a marker. This would allow you to quickly resort your cards if you dropped them. Otherwise you would haveto sort them by the card number. Lily Tomlin's first comedy album included how to soak the cards to shrink them ever so slightly and prevent them from feeding correctly. This was to be used on your AT&T phone bill as part of their revenue was supposedly earmarked for the Vietnam War. The reason the size of the dollar bill was chosen, was because drawers and cabinets to exactly hold them were all ready being used by banks to hold money. Therefore the cost for storing the cards was low and they didn't have to have something custom built.
Where else can we begin with a metal ruler, wind through the punch card history - looms, player pianos, IBM and its predecessors - and then thank the viewer for sending the metal ruler. I don't understand 97.9K subscribers. When one considers the amount of topics Gilles covers - this has to be THE best channel on the platform.
Giles only you could make the humble ruler so interesting, im 27 so too young to remember punch card stuff but i love the idea, especially the belt powered looms that used them way back during the industrial revolution, its great getting to see some pieces that ordinarily we wouldnt be able to see, History the story of man is so enjoyable to learn about, i said it earlier but thanks for telling this story so well, in highschool my history teacher had a ww1 gas mask on his desk, i would look at it and think it was weird and a bit creepy then finding out what it was used for how it was developed and what was inside it i felt something, i thought that it was an amazing story, whenever i looked at it again i saw something beautiful, not necessarily the object itself but the history behind it, the act of discovering the story was so enjoyable and ive loved history ever since
I've written thousands of programs and designed hundreds of reports using that so called "relic" of a metal ruler. There are still two of them in my desk today.
I started in data processing in 1967. My work began working with unit record equipment that was mainly used to create trust account statements. Cards were punched by the IBM360 each day containing transactions. The complete history was in hundreds of drawers of cards that were merged, extracted, and sorted every day. Selected cards went to an IBM1401 for printing. What is interesting is that about 10 years later I was programming systems that had all of those same cards on disk.
In my youth a punch card was included with your power company bill. One enterprising fellow figured out how to add holes so it was encoded as a credit so when he returned the card he did not need to include payment. When I was in a computer class in 1967 we used an IBM 1620 punch card based system I punched a lot of cards with Fortran II code.
I (a DUTCH citizen) still use an identical ruler today, a leftover from my job in the seventies. In the eighties I taught Data Processing evening classes to American Army Personel based in the Netherlands. It was there that I found out the Army was still using plenty of punched cards while businesses had mostly converted to disk and tape.
For someone of my generation it is weird that we must explain what is a line printer is. The drum type machine went obsolete, and it was relegated to mainframes but it was incredibly fast, and dot matrix (or needle printers as we called then) were used by microcomputers in general. Filling forms was nearly impossible on those printers , so many offices kept a typing machine (even a electric one that could be connected to a computer) around just to fulfill this role. A ruler like that would be useful. I am not so old that I used punch cards, but I saw and had several. But I used a Teletype machine from from Teletype (yes a very original name for a brand) , but just to test serial ports communications with computers (a TRS80 Model I) and used paper tape a few times. The nasty part is that every now and then the paper tape broke, and it was costumary to make a backup after ending and important thing. But while reading the tape was relatively fast, punching it took a lot more time and that was annoying. To this day the limit of 80 columns for Fortran (yes is still used NumPy library for Python is written mainly in Fortran, and (annoyingly for Python more like a guideline than a rule) comes from those cars that had 80 columns on it.
I still have a German Stano-Data II 18" Standardgraph ruler from the mid-70's, marked off in pica, inches, cm etc. It has two long slots so that each scale has its own edge for ruling against. We had a saying back when I was using the thing: "Drucken ist Pech" - printing is misfortune - because it was so bloody hard to get it right. I probably still have a Philips Electrologica pica ruler somewhere with all the machine-code instruction formats on, and the flowchart template that went with.
At 1:59 you mention the 1/12 scale, while the ruler is actually annotated with the legend 1/6. That scale is not so much for technical drafting, but rather also part of the business form design process. Because the standard printer of that time printed six lines of text per vertical inch. So the standard 11 inch sheet of fan-fold paper contained 66 lines of printed text. And at 10 characters per inch, a line of text of 80 characters was 8 inches long, leaving a margin of 1/4 inch on either side for the standard 8 1/2 inch wide paper. I have used a similar ruler up until the mid-to-late 1990s to design pre-printed business forms to be printed out with data on a line printer. Most business printers (line and dot-matrix) could take fan-folded paper up to 14 inches wide (including the sprocket holes on both sides) that could print up to 132 characters per line.
My wife started her career as a key punch operator back in the early 60's. We still have a couple of those rulers gathering dust some place in the house.
My grandpa was very fond of punchcards. Properly wrapped with steel wire to prevent them from disintegrating those things burned amazingly allowing for either the production of plum brandy or a cozy evening during the (then) harsh winters.
I used those steel rulers for much of my career repairing forms handling equipment aka FHE. The small holes of the scale could be laid over a metal tractor chain pins, which my company had patents on. IBM was a customer for those chains for their impact printers. The rulers were used to check for stretched tractor chains. These tractor chains were used to pull continuous fan-fold forms with matching holes every half an inch into: line printers, decollators, deleavers, detachers and many other types of after-writing forms processing equipment. The paper was often referred to as green bar paper. The chains were held together with rivet pins similar to a bicycle chain. The problem is as they wear out, the rivet pin ends wear down and the holes they fit into the sides of the chain also wear, then the entire chain starts stretching causing all kinds of problems, mostly paper jams, as the paper would stick to the out-of-tolerance tractor pins which were now more than a half an inch apart. The chains also drooped more when they were worn. There were tensioner guides, but once you exceeded that half an inch spec by too many hundreds of an inch the chain had to be replaced and realigned with the adjacent chain on the opposite side.
Decollators were next used to separate multi-part continuous forms into separate form stacks. One stack may be retained by the billing dept., another by the shipping dept., another would go to the warehouse, usually the bottom-most sheet that had the worst print quality was sent to the customer as a packing list for example. The forms originally used carbon interleaved paper when I first started working on them and it also had to be extracted during the decollating process, coiled up and discarded. Later an encapsulated paper coating technology was developed when the print head struck the form it transferred the impact through multiple layers where chemical A on the backside mixed with chemical B the front side of a sheet of paper forming an ink image. You could actually watch this development process take place over several seconds. This tech was also patented and was called cleanprint or carbonless paper. Most customers used three or four layer continuous forms, but the Govt used as many as eight layers of paper at one point during the seventies and eighties. The US Govt loves its paper. With carbon paper no matter how hard you set the printer to strike, the two bottom layers were fuzzy, faint and hard to read. On an 8-part forms with carbon that is 15 layers of paper! I don't think there are any printers left powerful enough to use 8-part paper.
Detachers used tractor chains to pull the decollated layers in one layer or stack at a time. They used a set of slow rollers to feed the paper under a breaker bar, which had to be set to the correct form depth. When say 11 inches of paper was fed in, a set of high speed rollers would snatch the end and stretch the paper and the perforation against a dull breaker bar, or a set of knuckles. They did not use guillotine blades (too slow and the timing was too critical). The breaker bar usually had three dull points that contacted the perforation and would cause it to break and tear from the center out to each side edge. Single point blades were used on narrow tab cards. This process was all patented. Some larger detachers could also separate IBM cards aka tab cards at very high speeds up to 600 feet of tab cards per minute. Tab cards being detached sounded like a machine gun firing at that feed rate. Short length materials like 3 x 5 cards also ran very fast, whereas the detacher had to be slowed down on 8.5, 11 and 14 inch long legal sized forms. One local University used a 22" long registration form that ran real slow and required a custom-built detacher to handle it each new Fall semester. The detachers were considered to be a final step in forms processing and they often had margin trimmers to cut the sprocket holes off the side of the sheets. When their tractor chains got stretched, they would suffer trim jams where the trim would wrap around the tractor chains and jam the slitter blades and make a huge mess. Often 1-inch steel shafts were twisted into cork screws. It kept me busy.
One other interesting factoid was that the tractor chain pins for decollators had to be smaller in diameter, because you were dealing with multiple layers of paper laid down and crimped together on a printing press. The holes in four layer forms never aligned perfectly. Large pins would stick in these slightly offset holes causing jams. The detachers aka bursters used wider pins that fit the sprocket holes in the paper almost exactly, because they were designed to work with only single fan-fold layers. Although we always had customers that wanted to burst multipart forms on our detachers. The solution was to install decollator tractor chains as the two chains were both the same length and were interchangeable. The smaller pins would reduce the accuracy of the margin trimmers on single part forms. They caused the trimmed edge cuts to weave slightly as the forms could drift side to side more. Then the customers would complain about the uneven slitting. Oh well! It was a long and interesting career for 42 years. As the fan-fold business died with the introduction of enterprise laser printers, my company moved into heat seal and pressure sealed business forms.
Fascinating, thank you!
I do love the way it starts by describing a now obsolete and to a modern viewer obscure piece of office equipment, to then quickly run through 200+ years of data processing history.
I have just discovered your channel. Many years ago(I am 81 years old), I had a pitney boes (sp) postage machine. I decided that I didn't have a need for it anymore. I wrote the company asking them to pick up their machine. My letter apparently got lost, and I continued to get a bill each month. After writing them several more letters, I continued getting monthly bills. The bills came on a punch card and you were suppose to return your payment along with the punch card. Finally, I bent, folded and mutilated the punch card and wrote on it "see my letter of such date", and mailed the card back to the company. I never got another bill from the company(also, they never sent somebody to pick up the machine either).
In the summer of 1984 I got a summer job at an insurance company headquarters, and operated an "OP-EX" (Open-Extract) machine. It would slice open the top of the envelope, and pause, then I would pull out the return form and check, upon which the conveyor cycled, dumping the empty envelope into a bin and bringing up the next one. Meanwhile I stacked the two pieces of paper on the proper stack.
Any kind of letter included has no place in the process. It says as much on the form (it was a bit past Hollerith cards), "do not include correspondence...".
So it could be worse than just ignoring the letter: it could prevent the bill from being paid, if the whole package was forwarded to the manager to be forgotten.
Sounds like the modem rental scam
You have tricked me into watching a video about punchcards that I thought was about rulers. Thank you !
As a high school student in the 70s I worked at a local university as a computer operator, reading in card programs for mostly graduate school students. The students often had several boxes of cards all color coded on the tops in hand drawn ink and color and different hatch marks denoting various sections of the program. One student was always rude and demanding so we made a mock up of his cards all color coded the same way. One day he was in an especially foul mode and the operator took the fake program and HEAVED it across the counter, spreading in randomly across the room. Rude student looked like he was having a heart attack as his dissertation research was destroyed. The operator just smiled and handed him is perfectly fine Genuine program. Rude student took the hint and actually became a good guy helping us out in peak times.
I work with IBM Mainframe systems and while the machines themselves barely resemble their predecessors from the '70s, those fixed 80 character records are still used all throughout the system and still commonly referred to as "cards". While actual card stock isn't usually used anymore, the hard- and software are still perfectly capable of addressing card readers, automatic punches and line printers. In fact, it isn't uncommon to see code that very likely was read in from actual cards still running today, neatly integrated with far more modern development.
When I started programming computers, IBM 1401s to be precise, the first 80 characters of storage were allocated to the card reader. To load a program in, a series of three bootstrap cards were loaded into this area, and a program was run which then loaded the rest of the deck in, hence, booting a computer. The 360 system used to call it IPL, though.
@@suntexi I mostly deal with IMS (the ancestor of document oriented databases and a management engine for stateless programs), so it's been a while since I actually did an IPL, but as usual for mainframes, the terminology has stuck.
Modern mainframes are something of an odd world, retaining a lot of technology for backward compatibility even to the early 1960s, yet also providing most of what developers have come to expect from today's more common platforms - all of this on some ridiculously oversized hardware that a single OS can't even handle. There has been hardware virtualization built in since the '70s to fix that and it's been possible (and common) to configure the system as a high availability cluster since the '90s.
Ahh yes. I worked for IBM 1998-2004. So many terms and acronyms that were different to the rest of the industry. IPL (initial program load) rather than booting. People really did say "I'll just IPL it". DASD (direct access storage device) or sometimes "hardfile" instead of hard drive. ABEND (abnormal end) instead of crash. And the ones associated with software development like APAR, PTF, FFST. Was completely baffling for the first few weeks, and I'd been around computers for quite a while before I started at IBM. Oh, and I wasn't even working in the mainframe or AS400 worlds, would have been much more confusing over there!
@@DavidMonro It took me a while to get most of the jargon out of my comments, that's for sure... And I haven't been around mainframes for long enough to forget how much my coworkers sounded like they were talking in a foreign language at first. Now, I know that I'm quite guilty of doing the exact same thing myself.
Former COBOL programmer here. Never had to deal with punch cards, but remnants of the punch card age were present everywhere. Column No 8 is where labels and section names go, instructions start at col 12, anything beyond col 72 is a comment and col 7 may hold a line divider if needed.
Another important use of unit records equipment in WWII was for tracking troop movements and reporting casualties. IBM machines were responsible for getting mail to soldiers wherever they were. My father (an IBM employee before and after his army service) was CO of a Machine Records Unit (MRU) in Italy during the war; he said the only day there were no casualties to report was Christmas, and he suspected that the COs of the reporting units had delayed their reports for the benefit of the survivors.
I was an AutoCoder-IOCs programmer for IBM for one summer during college. My job was to create programs for an IBM 1401 (a room-sized computer) to replicate the functions of the unit records machines taking up most of the floor I worked on (so they could be eliminated). I wrote the programs on forms pads, where they went to KP to be punched into cards to feed into the 1401's card reader, with output on huge line printers.
'You may never have heard of.....' and 'in the early days', you have successfully made me feel very old.
All of these videos demonstrate a tremendous amount of research and knowledge, but this one... This was incredible.
Great video. My dad used to work at a bank and I remember having IBM punch cards at the house. I never understood what my dad was trying to explain, what they were for and how they worked.
My grandpa once admitted that taking a card out of the stack and putting it somewhere else in the stack was the best way to troll the computer science students in college. That seems like a use.
I really enjoyed this stroll down memory lane. My first real job (I was in High School) was approx 1970 working with computers and punch cards, initially as an assistant to the operators, but later as a programmer. I had one of these rulers, it's probably still around here in my huge pile of nostalgia, somewhere. The group (what would today be the IT department) had about a dozen keypunches (with operators) and a full set of tab machines in addition to the computer. The eldest of the programmers had started before the computers, when the department store's own credit card records and billing was all done on punch cards and tabulating machines, and I loved listening to his stories from back then.
I grew up in the 70's and 80's and we'd get boxes of punch cards to use in art projects from the local government offices. Not sure if they were becoming obsolete by that point or not.
My career spanned the eras of punch cards, punched paper tape, mag drum, mag core, mag tape, mag disk, and solid state.
With both types of punch devices, in both civilian and military use, I never hear the bin that collected the waste products from punching called anything other than the "chad box". It was never called a bit bucket. The term bit bucket occurred much later and from the first was a purely mythical object where missing binary digits (bits) went to die.
It could be used to haze newbies by asking them to clean out the bit bucket, just as green recruits in the air force were sent for a "bucket of prop wash" (the gust of wind caused by a propeller), or auto mechanics apprentices sent to the store for "blinker fluid".
Air force here...I had to order the prop wash, muffler bearings, blinker fluid and the 50' of runway :)
Silly boy, EVERYone knows that only BMW mechanics need ‘blinker fluid’
And everyone knows that blinker fluid is needed to keep the blinkers from rusting, because BMW drivers are barred from using blinkers due to the NDA the buyers sign when purchasing a BMW.
And the ubiquitous engineering newbie trials of being sent to stores for a long weight (long wait) or a tin of rainbow or striped paint. The store men were always in on it, and obliged.
The 1/12 was not used by engineers, or anybody in business, to do 1inch to the foot scale drawings. Such drawings would be done with engineering rules - the triangular ones. Model makers commonly use a 1/12 scale, but again, wouldn't use one of these form rules.
The 1/12 & 1/6 scales are for printing-press printing. 1/6" is a "pica" - a standard unit in printing. A pica divided by 12 is a "point" - commonly used to describe type sizes (but that's not relevant here).
I learned a pica typewriter is twelve spaces per inch and an elite typewriter is ten spaces per inch. The IBM selectric had pica & elite type heads plus a switch to change the type pitch...
@@mdj.6179 - I was coming here to say that, but I thought it was the other way around? I thought "pica" was 10 per inch, and "elite" was 12 per inch. But it's been a long time, I might be remembering wrong. (Nope, I just looked - Wikipedia has an article on "typewriter pitch", and it says:
The most widespread fonts in typewriters are 10 and 12 pitch, called Pica and Elite, respectively. Both fonts have the same x-height, yielding six lines per vertical inch. There may be other font styles with various width: condensed or compressed (17-20 cpi), italic or bold (10 pitch), enlarged (5-8 cpi), and so on.
Pica, the typewriter font, should not be confused with pica, a unit equal to 1⁄6 of an inch or twelve points, usually measured vertically.
10 cpi and 12 cpi were common alternate character widths. 12 characters per inch on 11 inch paper gives 132 columns which was the other common line printer width during this era
Well I agree with the first paragraph I think the second is semi accurate. While the pica divided into 12 points may lead to the current computer standard of setting a type size to 12 points, on typewriters 10 per inch was pica and 12 per inch was elite. I still own a Smith Corona portable that is elite at 12 characters to the inch and in the past I owned an IBM Selectric that had adjustable spacing to 10 or 12 characters per inch as labeled on the typing ball..
Speaking as someone whose school rulers had 1/12" scales as well as 1/16" ones, how else were you supposed to measure 1/3" ?
I still have a number of these scales from the late 70's when I started as a programmer at General Tire. They were invaluable in laying out new reports. An anecdote that old folks will recall is that column 1 of a report was used for carriage control. We had an IBM 3800 laser printer that printed on the order of 13,000 lines a minute. Invariably tyro Fortran programmers would screw up and use column one for data. I managed to screw up a program that went into a loop printing lines of zeroes which was doubly bad because a zero in column 1 told the printer to go to a new page! The next morning I came into the office to find 20 boxes of printout with exactly 1 zero on the first line of the page. That gem resulted in me buying donuts for the three shifts of operators in the computer room. They all found it hilarious, my boss, not so much!
WONDERFUL!....brilliant overview. I started my career in computing in the days of the quite challenging hand card punch, a fearsome machine to master at other than the speed of a snail!
Absolutely fantastic! When this video started I pulled out my corresponding ruler to follow along. Same shape, but advertising "Moore Business Forms, Inc.", instead. I already knew about a few of the special scales, but had no idea about the holes matching up with printers' feed sprockets, nor the 1/12 scale for scaling drawings, nor the spacing for the original Hollerith cards. One thing you didn't mention was that the 1/12 scale had larger 1/6" spacing. That was used, in my Dad's office at least, to identify rows on pages from the line printers that were set for 6 lines per inch vertically. Used, of course, along with the 1/10" scale for horizontal spacing. This video made it interesting for this 70+ year-old to reminisce about some of the havoc he wreaked in his Dad's office as an adolescent in the '60s! (Details withheld in the interest of brevity and protecting the guilty party.)
I've had one of these rulers for decades. The original owner gave it to me when I started wood working and I never knew, until now, exactly what all of the graduations were originally used for. The gifter did indeed work in a printing shop. Excellent explanation of a long forgotten item...I've only used this 18" flexible ruler, as a straight edge...lol
@@GuitarRyder11what does your comment have to do with mine?..
Enjoyed your review of technology I used in my career with IBM from 1960s - 2005.
I still use my ibm ruler with all the different scales and holes.
I also have one of IBM’s early remote (person powered) data entry device about 8x11” and an inch thick. It had a drawer with blank prescored cards that slid one at a time under a template overlay showing the meaning of each hole and what to enter in each column on the card. Ie medical intake form Another popular application was with toll Highway use - Toll plaza info, exit on off, class vehicle, time entered and time exit from the toll highway. Also serial numbers on cards to control theft of funds.
A metal stylus was used to hand punch the desired hole. Then the completed card was slid in a second drawer to be turned in later.
Accuracy of data entered was so much better than being transcribed from hand written notes. The person that cared the most about the accuracy of the data entered the data And the data entered was available sooner.
I still use the back of punch cards for grocery lists Just the right size for a shirt pocket.
My father worked for IBM first as a field service tech, and later as a machine operator. IBM retrained him when his knees gave out. This was back when IBM was a good company to work for. Anyway I have his No. 6062 ruler. Its just like the one featured in this video, which I greatly enjoyed.
@@SeattlePioneer I understand what happened during 1992 that time was for the company survival.
I remember being in a meeting when a corporate exec told all of us to look left then right. Two of the three would be reassigned or gone within two years. It happened and those that remained had more responsibility and were better paid.
The company transformed. It was the first time there were ever layoffs in IBMs history.
The best description of Hollerith tabulation machines ever, all videos and books treat them as a footnote, it was the first time I learned about the relay system, the plug board and the exchangeable pre wireble plug boards. Very well done video. Thanks. The classic "I am not a number is Number 6 in The Prisoner opening that shows a punched card about him being put of a card drawer for "Resigned". PS finally I know the reason fro that big button in mainframes"
They used the leftover punchcard chad for confetti at high school & college football games back in the 60s, it was hell to get it in your eyes.
Now do one on the flowcharting template, a large rectangular piece of tinted (usually green) translucent plastic, with graph-paper style cross-hatched lines printed on the back, rulers on the long sides to count 10 per inch card columns and print columns and 8 per inch interpreter print columns (a machine that could be wired with a plugboard to print, at 60 characters per card, information punched in cards into specific positions between punch rows, to use the card as a “turnaround” document, such as a bill or check).
But the heart of the template was an assortment of larger holes of various shapes, punched into the interior, for drawing steps in a flowchart. All of these features together were used to diagram, by hand, the flow of data from one machine or program to another, or the flow of logic in a single program. The short edges even had cutouts for curly brackets.
Every programmer or systems analyst had one of those in their desk.
I inherited an entire E-size flat file drawer full of such templates from my predecessor who was still doing things by hand in 2012 when I took over his duties and promptly digitized everything.
I recall my flowchart template was tinted orange. But that does indeed bring back memories of the start of my IT career (before it was even called IT) back in the mid 1970's
i recall learning the flowchart symbols in college courses. To this day, I cringe when I see the wrong symbols being used or the lines going every which way.
As an interesting side note. The loom weaving cards were not liked by the textile workers as it put certain positions out of business. In revolt the workers attempted to interrupt the looms by throwing their shoes (wooden, I think) into the workings of the loom. Their shoes, called sabots (sp?) gave rise to the new word sabotage.
That sounds like a Luddite revolt.
I recommend reading "Blood in the Machine" which meticulously documents the original tech revolt you refer to and compares it to the today's nascent tech revolts against companies like Uber and Amazon. That book radically changed my view of the term "luddite".
In the early 80's the university I went to was still using punch cards for student registration. You ran around a big auditorium gathering up punch cards for all the classes you wanted. One punch card per class. And there were only as many punch cards for a class as the room could hold. So that also handled enforcing limits on class size. Then you turned those in with your master registration card and a couple other cards I don't know what they did when you left the auditorium. The staff just added them to the stack of cards and when registration closed they ran the whole stack of cards through the computer.
We Comp Sci students never worried too much about class size limits though or getting there early to get the desirable classes. The format for how a class was represented was easy to work out, and we had an unlimited supply of cards and of course full access to the keypunch machines. And there were always a few students that didn't make it to class every session or had dropped the class so having too many people show up wasn't really a problem. The profs could see they had more students registered than they should, but most of them smiled on that as it showed initiative and ambition.
Earliest method of smashing the stack type of memory attack akin to a single simple buffer overflow (of students :)
My father was a business forms designer who spent a year working freelance out of a home office. Seeing that ruler brings back a lot of memories.
As a total vintage-IBM nerd I still managed to learn something new from this! Never heard of punch card -optimized rulers before. Absolutely delighted 😄
Also; a very tasteful choice of a tie, especially since not doing any sorting or collating while wearing it!
I'd known this history *in summary* (not in this detail), and keypunched my own programs in my day, but still found your presentation fascinating. And it's true that you could branch into endless side stories about things like edge-notched cards, the paper tape that was another successor to Jacquard's cards, various means of reading either as well as pencil-marked papers, or details of the electric automation that grew up ahead of and later alongside the digital ways of handling punched cards. I'd seen at least one of those business rulers, but never looked close enough to make those connections.
Edge notches - I remember those from the cards in the back of library books!
Awesome story! Couldn't stop listening to this story. Very interesting!!
Fantastic video, I thought I knew a lot about this, but you went very deep. Thank you.
I just discovered your channel. Very interesting! In this case, I remember all of this - and more, about early "data processing." I started my career in the early 1970s with punch cards and tabulating machines, sorters, keypunches, and so on.
One item I would like to point out on the forms ruler is the inches divided into sixths. While it may have been used for blueprints, I had never heard of that. We used the 6th scale in conjunction with the tenths scale for determining the size of a form. Yes, line printers were universally in a 10 cpi scale (characters per inch) with the typical printer being 132 characters. The green bar paper was 11" x 14-7/8', including the tractor holes. That was horizontal spacing. Verticle spacing was 6 lpi (lines per inch). Thus, at 11', you could get 66 lines per standard green bar paper. This rarely was done with normal green bar. Depending upon the setup, there were blank lines allowed at the top and bottom for readability. I recall green bar being printed with an inch at the top and maybe a half-inch at the bottom. This paper can still be purchased online.
However, custom forms were very common. Every kind of business form from checks (cheques) to postcards to you name it, existed. This is why we needed these steel rulers to design the forms accurately before cases of the new forms were printed.
Since there were so many forms, you might ask, how does the printer "know" where a form starts and stops? The lengths can be quite different. Much like the Jacquard loom, there was a continuous paper tape, punched with holes, to tell the printer where TOF (top of form) was located. When we changed form types in the printer, we often had to change what was called the "carriage control tape." This defined the top, and in some cases, certain fields on the form. For example, rather than have the printer "step" downward to the "Total" area that was always the same on this form, on the bottom, the carriage control tape would allow the printer to skip directly to the total line. This saved time, and if you were printing 100,000 forms, that couple of seconds added up. Later editions of line printers had a virtual carriage control tape that could be programmed into the printer. How those printers worked is amazing in itself. There were fixed-type bar printers (early on). Later, there were chain printers and train printers. Finally, laser printers that are blindly fast. It got to the point where you fed paper in one end and had a bound book come out the other.
Thanks for a great video!
3:00 Having sixths of an inch is also for measuring lines on the page.
26:13 tie caught in card reader: Maybe that's the first person who was elegized with, "He was burred the next day, face down, nine edge first."
outstanding content. shows how extremely important invention is to society progression.we stand on the shoulders of those that came and suffered long before us.
I still have a couple of those rulers, and yes I used them for several of the things they were designed for. I used coding forms and had keypunch operators who would turn my coding into cards which were fed into the computer. I also presided over the change to coding at terminals where I worked and that did indeed create a huge improvement in productivity.
One legacy of punch cards I never hear people speak about is the addition of slash marks to Alphabetic characters in order to clearly distinguish them from the numeric characters they too closely resembled. That many terminal manufacturers got that backwards and put a dot or slash into the numeric 0 instead of the alpha O was always annoying because you always slashed the Z not the 2 and the S not the 5. All irrelevant now but of great importance once.
In my freshman year of college, we used punch cards. We were required to put a blank line above and below the comments in our Fortran programs. The "C" cards were especially valuable later as note cards, as the entire back (after the C) was free of annoying rectangular holes. The back of the 132 column fan fold paper was useful as large scratch paper. I recently found a ream at an estate sale and got it for a few bucks. Now I have a lifetime supply!
Still use a steel rular as you are describing in my wood shop. Usually only the 32's of an inch scale however. thank you for explaining the rest of the scales!
I had no idea what a nerd I was until I realized that I had just sat there, spellbound: fascinated, until I had watched the duration of this entire video. Thanks for your research and effort. You've earned this thumbs up and a new subscriber!
I have one at home. Got it from a company that created chain paper. We use it to create order fomts and the like. Still use it as it is a metal ruler. Love your explanation on the punchcards
To this day line printers are STILL impressively fast. And they were LOUD! Amazing machines indeed!
I remember a couple of those in the computer lab at my college in the mid 90s. Can still hear the noise! I probably still have guitar tablature (found on the early internet) printed on the green and white paper around somewhere. Also ripping off the perforated margins.
I remember being called in to fix/unjam them in primary school, since I was the only one around who knew how to do it.
I was eight years old. Even the teachers didn't know how to fix them, and felt it was easier to pull me out of class to do it than learn it themselves.
To this day, unjamming printers is a major job skill, because my employers refuse to fully embrace the 20th century. They still run a goddamn mainframe!
Brilliant! You remind me of a professor, his fascinating and eye-opening lectures were about the influence of technology on social behaviour. Thank you!
Great video. Finally I now how the programming of the Jacard loom worked. I feel absolutely frigging smart.
I still have one of those rulers. It was a promotional giveaway that I got back in the 1980s from a long-defunct company called Inmac. I knew that some of the holes lined up with the holes on tractor-feed printer paper but I had no idea what some of the other markings were for! Thanks for making this video!
I was a pressman for over 30 years and I have several rulers like this of different sizes from several different eras of the printing industry including ones for setting different sized metal type, setting up letter presses for business and greeting cards, blueprints, stting up the lazer prints for four color offset presses, archetecture, many different kinds of rulers and guides including a couple for different sizes and styles of punch cards and anylitical machines, setting up printing presses for printing raffle tcickets and even a 40 inch one with a beveled edge and guide marks for checking and separating sheets of the old paper food stamps.
The near Strangled To Death story: This is why you see people Not Wearing ties or necklaces around moving machinery!!! (or if you're wearing something around your neck it either is clip-on (like a tie) or has a "break-away" joint, so the machine gets it and not you!)
Just shows how dangerous ties could be. I know of one instance where my manager leant over a printer which consumed his tie. The assistant manager had to find a pair of scissors to free him. Thank goodness, ties are going the same way as punched cards. And business suits.
You would often see technical staff, in places where ties were ubiquitous, with their ties pushed inside their shirts so they didn't dangle into anything dangerous. I got my aversion to ties from such places. My philosophy on ties is that they should never be worn if you are dealing with moving equipment, liquids, fire, high voltages, low static requjrements, or are generally clambering around on things. Ties have a life of their own, and are always getting into places they shouldn't be😊
It baffles me why wearing a coloured insanitary noose is a great fashion statement. Ties are filthy, germ-laden strips of cloth which are a penis-substitute and share one's urine.@@crabby7668
I have one of those rulers because I wanted one with 1/32" markings and not just the standard 1/16" found on most 12" rulers. I never knew or cared what the holes and text were about so thanks for educating me about this interesting history!
Amazing information, starting with a question of what do these numbers mean on this ruler? Into the birth of punchcard technology through its history and devolopment all the way into the start of digital data storage. Its truly amazing how you can go over such a broad space of time and yet still touch on all the steps and advancements of the topic in such detail. I have only recently discovered this channel and i must say your content is great, you cover things i would have otherwise never known about or how signifigant a role they played in not only its time but how it lead to the amazing technology of today.
Great video! I have one of these rulers. Have used it all my life (and still do). My mother once explained the features to me but I was too young. My mother worked with these at her job before she was married.
Interesting connection with Babbage's Analytical Engine was Lady Ada Lovelace who is now considered the first programmer. She was the daughter of a "scandalous" gentleman according to 1812ish London society.....🙂
Thanks for very interesting articles. Cheers from Comox Valley.
I used to work with punched tape as recently as 2004-2006. It was a CNC machine tool with Fanuk-6M numerical control system. We had both a tape reader and a puncher.
The one and only computer class I had to take in college in the late 70s required writing simple programs on punch cards. The entire process back then was tedious.
In 1977 I was assigned a project while on medical hold. I was taken to a single wide trailer full of parts for an electronics repair department. My job was to punch out the IBM cards using a ten key keyboard with the part identifying number and the cabinet shelf and bin location to inventory the trailer. As new parts came in we, there were two of us assigned, we updated the cards. (making new ones). They then went on to be sorted and used to print out on a line printer the inventory that a tech could read to find the parts he/she needed. To this day my fingers ache when I see an old punch card.
This brings back SO many memories...
I worked as an IBM mainframe programmer in the 80s and 90s. While punch cards weren't being used much by then, there were still a lot of them laying around. One of the more obscure uses for them was to staple the short end together in a circle on one end, lightly folding over the other end of each card and stapling its to itself forming a point, and then spray painting the whole thing green to make a Christmas wreath.
Used to do that with tv guides fold a corner to the middle every page staple front to back and a facsimile of a tree spray paint green and ornaments Christmas tree. Back when American was wholesome. 55 years ago
I remember making these wreaths in college!
I remember making these wreaths in college!
6:25 - there are still places where these are still in use. I visited Hanoi maybe 10 years ago and part of the tour was a textile weaving district, where they wove (IIRC) silk cloth. The looms - who knows how old they were - used punched cards exactly like this.
I used punched cards when I took my first programming course circa 1981 or 82 (CDC6600, FORTRAN 4) - there were stacks and stacks of them free for the taking (I used them for taking notes, for shopping lists, shimming up table legs, etc.), banks of card punches with keyboards (and people waiting to use them), line printers for output (with people hanging around for their jobs to complete and print), card readers (with people waiting in line to submit their stacks of cards), a room full of half-forgotten machines, which turned out to be card sorters, card printers and card duplicators, and big recycling bins for cards with mistakes and printouts of computer jobs that quit halfway due to bugs. It all went away in the space of about 3-4 years - actual computer terminals and actual electronic files stored somewhere seemed a huge improvement, as did floppy discs and PCs a few years later.
...and you could fold the short end into a cone like shape and assemble the cards into Christmas wreaths...
A few years ago, on a trip to Venice, Italy, we had a tour of a velvet brocade weaving company. They hand-weave using very fine silk thread. The hand looms date from that early 1800's Jacquard invention era because modern power looms put too much tension on the threads and break them. They have the original Jacquard card apparatus on top of the looms controlling the mechanism. They said that at the time Napoleon took over Venice, the French shut down their business because it was competition for French weavers. The building was locked. When the French were driven out, the door was unlocked and they resumed. They said that the addition of the Jacquard mechanism increased loom production from 10 cm per day to 30 cm per day. They have a library of all the patterns they have ever produced, but have to re-punch and thread new copies if they get an order to re-do an old job because the cards deteriorate.
Thanks for this fascinating history of this ruler. I actually found one of these rulers in a Goodwill just a few days ago and was wondering what all the markings and holes were for. I do paper crafts (junk journals mostly) and am always looking for helpful tools and papers, ledgers, etc. When I saw this for $0.99 and it was so interesting, I had to buy it. I searched for the name on it (UARCO) to see if I could find out more about it. You came through and it was way more interesting that I thought it would be!
Excellent work! I would never have guessed that behind the mild-mannered Business Forms Ruler lay stories of the line printer, Jacquard loom, Babbage analytical engine, Hollerith census tabulator, IBM, and the humble 80-column punch card.
Well I feel old as hell seeing someone explain a kind of printer paper I clearly recall from grade school as if it’s an ancient artifact. Lol!
YOU feel old? Those things didn’t yet exist when I was in grade school!
Interesting rabbit hole. Textile looms, US census, WW2 cryptography... and it all started with a simple ruler.
"100 CONTINUE" - card was the master card. It was so common in freshmen's Fortran programs that there was a bin in Helsinki Polytechnic for slightly used "100 CONTINUE"-cards.
I still have one of these rulers. And a stack of blank punch cards. They were great for taking notes and fit right in your shirt pocket.
I have one of those metal rulers in my desk at home. I used it at work in the later half of the 1970s on into the 1980s.
As long as green-bar, fan-fold paper was used for any printing that ruler came in handy for verifying the alignment of a report on the paper.
For the 10 or 12 units per inch, if you're old enough, you may remember typewriters had essentially two "fonts". "Pica" at 10 per inch and "Elite" at 12 per inch.
capn - Yes, I remember and I have used all of that for programming (Fortran, Basic, Cobol, PL/1, etc.) and for report design spacing. I have two of the rulers still today.
I still have one. Mine was given to me by my forms salesman from Uarco. (in 1988 Uarco was acquired by its competitor, Standard Register, the source of your ruler. Mine has a scale for estimating the number of punched cards. Those of us that designed punched card applications had a good friend who was the forms salesman. My family had a baby-grand player piano. Hollerith called his machine a "tabulator" because it created "tables." I had been using tabulators for decades without knowing why it was called that. Tables, printouts, were the primary form of output for data processing systems for fifty years.
I knew about most of the computing side, but the part about bills, cheques, ID cards, etc being punch cards was never something I’d heard before yet instantly made perfect sense. Everything which had a mag stripe growing up, or a chip and/or RFID unit more recently, would’ve had card punch holes back then.
Of course! - no institution that wanted to computerise their records was going to wait for magnetic tape technology to get mature/cheap enough for a stripe on a card, even if it was only 10-20 years away!
I still have mine, used in the mid-80s to design a data-entry form for a new system. I took it home with me when they canceled the project. We referred to those printers as "green bar printers."
Do you work from a script? Because your flow of information and manner of speaking suggest you don't, which is amazing to listen to. I had a history professor once in university who was very old and experienced and he would come into class and basically tell a very detailed story for 80 minutes and it was fascinating to listen to every week. Never worked off of a book. Just talked straight, hit names and dates and key significances. I enjoyed it immensely even though I had to take notes at warp speed the whole class.
Well, yes and no. I don't read off a teleprompter, but I do rehearse a basic "script" of sorts before going in front of the camera. Unfortunately, I am only very rarely able to get the whole thing out in one go, either because I flub words, lose my train of thought, or come up with a better way of saying something. Thus, nearly all of my videos involve a large number of takes, the best of which make it into the video. You've likely noticed the large number of fades between segments to hide the cuts.
@@CanadianMacGyver Yeah, but still it's so much more engaging to watch than some creators who read straight off a teleprompter. Keep up the amazing work.
@@oldmandoinghighkicksonlyin1368I'm really curious - was this professor's last name Black, by any chance? Yeah, weird coincidence as I had a history prof in college who did exactly the same thing. Never used the course textbook, just picked up where he left off last time and continued the narrative at warp speed. And I loved it, as I was pretty fast with taking notes, and the way he would relate many strange details about historical figures and events (often things that no sane textbook writer would ever consider including) made the whole experience so much more fascinating. Best history course I ever took.
@@usaturnuranus I don't remember his name--it was 20 years ago. It was at the University of Ottawa. I took three European history classes with him (covering 1500CE to 1900CE)He looked like the quintessential history professor: tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, turtleneck, about 70 years old, cantankerous, balding with a bushy white fringe. He also had that those 1970's Soviet-era eyeglasses.
Like you, each class was a joy of furious note-taking. I wish I had learned stenography for that class. Laptops were around but I'm fairly certain if I brought one in and started typing on it, he would've told me to close it and get out of his class.
He inspired me to take other history classes as electives, but it just wasn't the same with other professors who used PowerPoint presentations and talked about subjects I was interested in. If he was the only professor that taught history at my university, I would've minored in it.
I did an 8.5 hour technical training session without notes once. You can do it - if you know your subject.
I learned way more cool stuff than i though I would coming in, awesome video!
>>Very entertaining! As a Graduate Teaching Assistant more years ago than a bit bucket could collect, I taught some of this stuff, and I am delighted to learn more from a whippersnapper like you.
>>Best of luck in the Matrix, HA!
>>Respectfully, NHG
Interesting how IBM wanted to have exclusivity on punch cards. We see that now with K-cups, ink jets and even label printers where they use digital rights management to lock a user in to using only 'official' expendables.
A well prepared lecture!
I started programming in 1963 at which time I received a forms ruler. It is in my desk at home today. I still use it on occasion to draw straight lines and measure things in tenths of inches.
I still have multiple boxes of software that my late mother wrote in the 70s and early 80s on IBM punchcards. :)
I have a brass ruler from the 1960"s. I used it when I worked for Redi-Set Business Forms (long gone). Still use it today.
The Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation in Waltham, Mass. has 2 or 3 of these on display in the section of the museum devoted to measuring equipment and devices. Precision measurement is an important part of that city's industrial heritage. I was tickled to see that one of the rulers on display was the same as one that I had bought in yard sale and use regularly.
Good to know. The Museum of Printing in Haverhill is also worth a visit.
A little off topic, but I worked in a UPS administrative facility in the mid-80s as a tech geek. In one of the buildings there was a small-ish, windowed "office". Inside the "office" was a large wood and plexiglass cube - about 4 feet on a side. Inside the cube was a line printer "cage" that was about 3 feet on a side. The printer used green bar paper. When in use, the noise - a really fast BAM BAM BAM BAM - was almost unbearable if the printer cage was open. When closed, the noise was still considerable. Outside the "office" with the door closed, one could still hear a WHUMP WHUMP WHUMP almost anywhere in the building. Times change. 🙂
Early numerical control machine tools used punch tape that stored machine movements and actions. I remember using that equipment.
Memories! I have not seen mine since my last move, but I still have that marvelous little device used for punching the paper tapes we used on the IBM 1403 printers in the early 70s. BTW, beautiful Christmas wreaths could be made using punch cards.
Way late to the show, and it may have already been covered by another comment, but the 1/10" and 1/12" scales are for the two common typewriter pitches -- pica (10 characters per inch) and Elite (12 characters per inch). The 1/12" scale was not normally used for scale drawings.
Back in the 70s, I was a field service engineer for one of the mainframe companies. Our customer issued paychecks that were punch cards.We didn't punch them, but we did read them after they were cashed. Those cards were frequently folded and mutilated. The worst was that some places put fimgerprint stickers on the back of the checks. Those almost always jammed the card reader.
People today don't know what the term means "Do not bend, fold, staple or mutilate"
You mentioned punch cards for musical instruments. Especially dance/fairground organs made use of it since 1892 (book music patented by Gavioli, organ builder in Paris) and were processing the music data with pneumatic controlled air signals. In my opinion this was a missed opportunity building a computer as organ builder had all necessary tools and basics like 'and', 'or', 'not' or bistable switches made with pneumatic valves capable to operate at 5 Hz. Btw. very relyable lasting about 20 years with minimal maintanance made of wood, leather and some metal spring wire.
If only Herman Hollerith would have looked inside such an organ at Coney Island. He would have switched to pneumatic. Around 1900 in Germany organ builders could read their books without physcal touching the 'book' just by air decompression when there is a hole in the cardboard playing tremolos up to 8 ticks per second.
I (thankfully) did not deal with punched cards. I programmed IBM "mid range" systems 34, 36 and 38 that used magnetic storage. I had IBM's version of this ruler. I used it constantly to program accounting systems to print forms like checks, statements, invoices, purchase orders, W2, W9, etc. I kept using it when we graduated from line printers to lasers and desktop computer networks. Thanks for reminding me about this tool, and educating everyone under 40 about automation before we all got supercomputers in our pocket.
Cool video. What a rabbit hole. I'm a few months younger than Bill Gates. At my high school in 1973 we had a computer lab. Big teletype type machines that we'd type Basic into to write programs. Type in the lines of code, hit Run, it worked or it didn't. Then we'd troubleshoot and run it again. Bill Gates was doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same time.
Our school district decided we were using too much computer time so they made us instead make punch cards for our programs. I was never able to write another program that worked. The lesson here is that if you want your society to excel and lead the world then make your most advance equipment accessible as much as possible to your students. Who knows what might've happened had we been allowed to continue typing in our lines of Basic, or if this opportunity were made available nationwide. A few million bucks in the 1970s....
& I once bought a fabric shower curtain at Target because its label said it was made on a Jacquard loom. I absolutely could not resist. I've never had a fabric shower curtain before or since. Ada Lovelace would've approved.
When my brother first started working for Kennedy Space Center he was tasked with archiving the old space program data(Apollo,Skylab,Gemini,Mercury) . It was all on dot computer paper that was stored in an old blockhouse (and elsewhere). Much of it was damaged and data was lost .At the time they didn't have the ability to digitally copy the data off of dot paper . All of the individual dots ate up enormous amounts of memory .Later they were able to digitally copy/store just the text .
I had one of those in the '90s, because it had the 1/10" markings, to work out which column was which on the printouts. Also to draw lines (doh), but then the Operators started sword-fighting with them, and they chipped the heck out of the edges. And yes, I started programming with punchcards in the '80s.
When I took my first programming course in 1977 we wrote FORTRAN programs on green forms, these went to the punching department, where they were typed up and punched, by two ladies, actually. The first one punched the card, and the second one basically did the proofreading by typing it again against the card.
The brogram was the run through the compiler and during the next lesson a week later we would get the printout, either as a list of compiler errors, or the output of the program.
I probably still have a stack of cards around somewhere of the biorhythm program I wrote then...
I also have memories of punchcards messing with an election...
The 1/6-inch markings were typically used vertically on the paper to represent the line spacing, because the printers normally printed at 6 lines per inch.
Several Comments
As a computer science we would draw a diagonal line across the top of a card stack with a marker. This would allow you to quickly resort your cards if you dropped them. Otherwise you would haveto sort them by the card number.
Lily Tomlin's first comedy album included how to soak the cards to shrink them ever so slightly and prevent them from feeding correctly. This was to be used on your AT&T phone bill as part of their revenue was supposedly earmarked for the Vietnam War.
The reason the size of the dollar bill was chosen, was because drawers and cabinets to exactly hold them were all ready being used by banks to hold money. Therefore the cost for storing the cards was low and they didn't have to have something custom built.
I remember that diagonal line trick. Best to use a thick black marker for it.
Excellent, comme toujours. Merci monsieur Messier.
Where else can we begin with a metal ruler, wind through the punch card history - looms, player pianos, IBM and its predecessors - and then thank the viewer for sending the metal ruler.
I don't understand 97.9K subscribers.
When one considers the amount of topics Gilles covers - this has to be THE best channel on the platform.
Giles only you could make the humble ruler so interesting, im 27 so too young to remember punch card stuff but i love the idea, especially the belt powered looms that used them way back during the industrial revolution, its great getting to see some pieces that ordinarily we wouldnt be able to see, History the story of man is so enjoyable to learn about, i said it earlier but thanks for telling this story so well, in highschool my history teacher had a ww1 gas mask on his desk, i would look at it and think it was weird and a bit creepy then finding out what it was used for how it was developed and what was inside it i felt something, i thought that it was an amazing story, whenever i looked at it again i saw something beautiful, not necessarily the object itself but the history behind it, the act of discovering the story was so enjoyable and ive loved history ever since
I've written thousands of programs and designed hundreds of reports using that so called "relic" of a metal ruler. There are still two of them in my desk today.
I started in data processing in 1967. My work began working with unit record equipment that was mainly used to create trust account statements. Cards were punched by the IBM360 each day containing transactions. The complete history was in hundreds of drawers of cards that were merged, extracted, and sorted every day. Selected cards went to an IBM1401 for printing. What is interesting is that about 10 years later I was programming systems that had all of those same cards on disk.
In my youth a punch card was included with your power company bill. One enterprising fellow figured out how to add holes so it was encoded as a credit so when he returned the card he did not need to include payment.
When I was in a computer class in 1967 we used an IBM 1620 punch card based system I punched a lot of cards with Fortran II code.
Fascinating as always
I (a DUTCH citizen) still use an identical ruler today, a leftover from my job in the seventies. In the eighties I taught Data Processing evening classes to American Army Personel based in the Netherlands. It was there that I found out the Army was still using plenty of punched cards while businesses had mostly converted to disk and tape.
For someone of my generation it is weird that we must explain what is a line printer is. The drum type machine went obsolete, and it was relegated to mainframes but it was incredibly fast, and dot matrix (or needle printers as we called then) were used by microcomputers in general. Filling forms was nearly impossible on those printers , so many offices kept a typing machine (even a electric one that could be connected to a computer) around just to fulfill this role. A ruler like that would be useful.
I am not so old that I used punch cards, but I saw and had several. But I used a Teletype machine from from Teletype (yes a very original name for a brand) , but just to test serial ports communications with computers (a TRS80 Model I) and used paper tape a few times. The nasty part is that every now and then the paper tape broke, and it was costumary to make a backup after ending and important thing. But while reading the tape was relatively fast, punching it took a lot more time and that was annoying.
To this day the limit of 80 columns for Fortran (yes is still used NumPy library for Python is written mainly in Fortran, and (annoyingly for Python more like a guideline than a rule) comes from those cars that had 80 columns on it.
I still have a German Stano-Data II 18" Standardgraph ruler from the mid-70's, marked off in pica, inches, cm etc. It has two long slots so that each scale has its own edge for ruling against. We had a saying back when I was using the thing: "Drucken ist Pech" - printing is misfortune - because it was so bloody hard to get it right.
I probably still have a Philips Electrologica pica ruler somewhere with all the machine-code instruction formats on, and the flowchart template that went with.
What an adventure. Bonne fête, Gilles.
I have one of these rulers sitting right next to me.
I bought it in the 1970s, because I was working as a Computer Scientist.
At 1:59 you mention the 1/12 scale, while the ruler is actually annotated with the legend 1/6. That scale is not so much for technical drafting, but rather also part of the business form design process. Because the standard printer of that time printed six lines of text per vertical inch. So the standard 11 inch sheet of fan-fold paper contained 66 lines of printed text. And at 10 characters per inch, a line of text of 80 characters was 8 inches long, leaving a margin of 1/4 inch on either side for the standard 8 1/2 inch wide paper.
I have used a similar ruler up until the mid-to-late 1990s to design pre-printed business forms to be printed out with data on a line printer.
Most business printers (line and dot-matrix) could take fan-folded paper up to 14 inches wide (including the sprocket holes on both sides) that could print up to 132 characters per line.
My wife started her career as a key punch operator back in the early 60's. We still have a couple of those rulers gathering dust some place in the house.
My grandpa was very fond of punchcards. Properly wrapped with steel wire to prevent them from disintegrating those things burned amazingly allowing for either the production of plum brandy or a cozy evening during the (then) harsh winters.
good ol' hollerith cards. if you drop a deck once, you don't do it twice.