Ever get a QSL card like this?

[w1vtp]

Discovered it languishing away in the drawer I used to keep my QSL cards in my oak desk drawer.  They since have migrated out to the garage (climate controlled).  One holdout was  modeled after the old IBM card surfaced so I've restored its rightful place with all its friends.

My wife, Janice, KA1HTS, used to working "key punch" (not data entry) and was quite familiar with the cards
Al

[N0WEK]

Discovered it languishing away in the drawer I used to keep my QSL cards in my oak desk drawer.  They since have migrated out to the garage (climate controlled).  One holdout was  modeled after the old IBM card surfaced so I've restored its rightful place with all its friends.

My wife, Janice, KA1HTS, used to working "key punch" (not data entry) and was quite familiar with the cards
Al

Warning, warning...thread hijack....

Does anybody know anyone who needs about 10,000 unused 80 column cards. I've been sitting on them for years and hate to scrap them, hopefully some antique computer hobbyist needs them. Free to a good home, pick up in Minneapolis or pay for shipping. I already scrapped the keypunch machines that came with them.

[flintstone mop]

Those were the dayz when a computer with the power of Win 95 machine took up an entire room.
AL, are the punches in CW code or is the QSO info just at the top?
Fred

[n1bnc]

About 34 or so years ago I received a card like this where the ham punched out his call sign in the big field. I don't think I have it anymore as it was way too many moves ago.

Amusing card!!!

[K4RT]

Al - Thanks for sharing that photo. That's an interesting looking card. I wonder if W3GQM had developed early computer logging software, with a card for each contact. He might have fed batches into the machine and printed out on the old green and white IBM paper his entire log, WAS contacts, DXCC contacts, etc.

A few years after your W3GQM QSO I took a computer class in college that included key-punching what we called "Hollerith" or "IBM" cards to program a computer. That was the sunset era for that technology, but at that time IBM was still king of everything computers.

[KA0HCP]

"Do not fold, spindle or mutilate"

Remember when government paychecks used these cards?

[w1vtp]

Those were the dayz when a computer with the power of Win 95 machine took up an entire room.
AL, are the punches in CW code or is the QSO info just at the top?
Fred

Fred

Follow down the columns on the numbers & note the matches.  My call sign was typed in later using a typewriter with a red ribbon. I'm thinking he printed 100's of cards by printing them on the keypunch machine.  Pretty cheap, huh?

Al

[W4EWH]

Does anybody know anyone who needs about 10,000 unused 80 column cards. I've been sitting on them for years and hate to scrap them, hopefully some antique computer hobbyist needs them. Free to a good home, pick up in Minneapolis or pay for shipping. I already scrapped the keypunch machines that came with them.

Please tell us how big the box(es) is/are, and how much they weigh.

The computer museum in Boston may be interested: I'll ask.

73,

Bill, W1AC, who still has some cards with the "Northeastern University" logo as a watermark

[Carl WA1KPD]

I had to take Fortran in school (Northeastern Univ Finance class of 76) and I HATED  HATED  HATED   >:(every second spent with those punch cards. I liked the theory of programing, but the intense attention to detail in each card drove me nuts.
Just seeing one brought back bad memories from 40 years ago.
I cannot remember the number of times I would go into the commuter center at 3 to do a quick program and still be there at 10 when they closed..... But it was way too often
Oh well
73
Carl
WA1KPD

[nq5t]

Please tell us how big the box(es) is/are, and how much they weigh.

2000 cards per box, a bit over 10 lbs if I recall.  18" long maybe (escapes me exactly).

It was easy to remember the number of cards in a box — all that has to happen is to drop one open box ONCE, and have not bothered to put sequence numbers on the semester's worth of work.  Tends to burn the card count into non-erasable memory 

[K6JEK]

"Do not fold, spindle or mutilate"

 Instead,

"Flex, fan and joggle"

Nutcases out here have restored a couple of IBM 1401's, which loved those 80 column cards. It's a machine from 1959, a decimal computer with variable word length, a masterpiece from Endicott, New York, now alive and well in Mountain View, California. Incidentally, Mike Cheponis, the fellow who kicked this off is K3MC/6.

http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/restoring-the-ibm-1401/

Kind of a noisy video showing cards doing the heavy lifting of business data processing in the early '60's including a cameo appearance by a working 1401.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b48uiLsF19s

[nq5t]

Nutcases out here have restored a couple of IBM 1401's,

Nutcase? …   Heck, I'd like nothing better in the spare room than a fully functional IBM 1620

Somewhere in a dirty box in the attic I think I still have the listing for the assembler source code for a one pass Fortran compiler I wrote in 1964 (and keypunched every line of code, one card at a time) for one  …. computing has come a long way since then, but it has never been as much fun

Grant NQ5T

[KB2WIG]

"  computing has come a long way since then, but it has never been as much fun "

Like saving a few gallons of the "punch outs" and loading them into a Dodge Darts defroster?

Fun times.


klc

[W1ADR]

Memories from a time when Oscillograph Flight Test data were read by hand with a Douglas Scale and keypunched for subsequent data processing.

[N0WEK]

Please tell us how big the box(es) is/are, and how much they weigh.

2000 cards per box, a bit over 10 lbs if I recall.  18" long maybe (escapes me exactly).

It was easy to remember the number of cards in a box — all that has to happen is to drop one open box ONCE, and have not bothered to put sequence numbers on the semester's worth of work.  Tends to burn the card count into non-erasable memory 

Pretty good memory...each case has 5 boxes of 2,000 cards each (10,000 cards per case), weighs about 58 lbs and is 16 x 18 x 8 1/2 inches.

I have two cases.

Free to a good home!

[W4EWH]

Pretty good memory...each case has 5 boxes of 2,000 cards each (10,000 cards per case), weighs about 58 lbs and is 16 x 18 x 8 1/2 inches.

I have two cases.

Free to a good home!

UPS say each cartoon would cost $62.87 to ship to my QTH (near Boston).

I suggest you ask your local museums.

73,

Bill W1AC

[WU2D]

I attended SUNY in Canton NY and remember them bringing in an RCA301 complete which had been donated by Niagara Mohawk. Now that beast could read cards and tape faster than you could blink. It was hopelessly outdated by 1977 but still impressive fun to explore and maintain. Giant power supplies, germanium flip flops, stacks of core memory and mag tape drives.

[N0WEK]

Pretty good memory...each case has 5 boxes of 2,000 cards each (10,000 cards per case), weighs about 58 lbs and is 16 x 18 x 8 1/2 inches.

I have two cases.

Free to a good home!

UPS say each cartoon would cost $62.87 to ship to my QTH (near Boston).

I suggest you ask your local museums.

73,

Bill W1AC

Who knows, if I still have them and something or someone is headed that way I'll send them your way. I'll let you know first of course.

Greg

[K6JEK]

Nutcases out here have restored a couple of IBM 1401's,

Nutcase? …   Heck, I'd like nothing better in the spare room than a fully functional IBM 1620

Somewhere in a dirty box in the attic I think I still have the listing for the assembler source code for a one pass Fortran compiler I wrote in 1964 (and keypunched every line of code, one card at a time) for one  …. computing has come a long way since then, but it has never been as much fun

Grant NQ5T

Impressive, although for full credit you need not just the listing but the cards themselves.

[WA2OLZ]

Any other relatively old-timer computer types here? I started with Burroughs equipment when in the USAF. They had what we would now call a modem that went between the TTY and the crypto gear. Model HN-1. When I got out of the service (1966) I went to work as a field service engineer for Honeywell EDP. Mostly models 400, 200 and 1200. It blew my mind that they had no tubes in them! Used to work on IBM 1401 card gear until we came out with our own.

[N0WEK]

My first job out of the Navy in 1969 was operator in a computer room with IBM 360/30, 360/40 and a 360/50, all of them with quite a few enhancements. We ran those 24/7 along with document scanners, payment coupon scanners, AB Dick label printer. We did all the in/out on payment coupons, dunning letters, payroll and invoices. Lots and lots of tape drives!

My wife ran mainframes for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune for more than 25 years, she's been running network security and documentation ever since they went to a shared server about 10 years ago.

[K6JEK]

Any other relatively old-timer computer types here? ...

I bet you'll find lot of us.

I was a system software engineer hanging out in computer labs as we called them starting in 1972, punching my own cards, running my own system builds. Mostly mini-computer stuff back then which was hands on for developers. We were the computer operators not just the programmers. We pretty much lived in the labs either building, testing, or printing memory dumps after the damned thing crashed.

I was amused to see the cover of the line printer tilted up in the videos I posted. We did that because page ejects caused paper jams. Lid up -- no jams but it made them LOUD. Others of my age can blame rock concerts for their lousy hearing. For me it was line printers (and rock concerts).

Incidentally, as highfalutin as it sounds, Systems Software Engineer, it was not big money. Maybe somewhere it was, but not where I was. Make the rent. That was about it.

[AJ1G]

I was amused to see the cover of the line printer tilted up in the videos I posted. We did that because page ejects caused paper jams. Lid up -- no jams but it made them LOUD. Others of my age can blame rock concerts for their lousy hearing. For me it was line printers (and rock concerts).
[/quote]
The main computer lab at URI in the early 70s was Ballentine Hall, which was a Business Department building.  We engineering students did our Fortran programming on cards, with all the woes and frustrations of getting them to run in batch mode (turn it in to the SYSOP, come back the next day, find out you had 3 syntax or typo errors, rinse and repeat), however a lot of the business programming was being done using I/O terminals based on the IBM Selectric typewriters.  The main room where the terminals were located had at least 50 of them banging away on a busy day.  Talk about LOUD! 

[nq5t]

Any other relatively old-timer computer types here?

Oh, yes.  This was my first "personal" computer   I still have a pile of documentation and code around here somewhere.  Sadly, this beautiful machine, which was still being used productively into the late 60's, was disassembled sometime in the late 70's.  It didn't get the front page publicity of some of the more well-known hollow state machines of the 50's, but was at least as good, if not ultimately far better.

http://www.cs.rice.edu/History/R1/

Sadly, the R2 project, referred to briefly in the article, which I had a hand in as a graduate student was ultimately abandoned (a mix of money, politics, and tenured egos).   It would have been interesting to see what might have come from that.

Grant NQ5T

[N0WEK]

From Day by Day comic...complete with Star Wars reference...