[HN Gopher] IBM Port-A-Punch: create punched card documents anyw...
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IBM Port-A-Punch: create punched card documents anywhere
Author : ingve
Score : 28 points
Date : 2021-03-06 18:00 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tedium.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (tedium.co)
| Animats wrote:
| That idea lived on as the Votomatic punch card voting system,
| which was responsible for the 2000 Florida election mess.[1]
|
| [1]
| http://www.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/11/15/jackson.pu...
| JamesCoyne wrote:
| Cool. I wonder if this was useful in forestry because the punch
| cards were quite sturdy, compared maybe to a clipboard full of
| forms, or field notebook.
|
| A little more detail from the cited article: "The personnel of
| each crew includes a forester, a crew chief and a tallyman"
| Later: "All records are in code: Mastery of the code is a large
| part of the preliminary training..."
| Someone wrote:
| I wondered what they used to guarantee the holes would be
| rectangular and correctly placed. From the picture, it seems
| the holes were partly pre-cut.
|
| I fear that increases the risk holes could accidentally appear
| when folding, spindling or mutilating such a card.
|
| That would make them less sturdy than 'normal' punch cards.
|
| On the other hand, given that this survived reading in a
| punchcard reader even once, those not-punched holes must have
| been fairly sturdy.
| JamesCoyne wrote:
| I can't seem to find a picture online, but a blind person
| once showed me a "pocket brailer" that was a sort of sliding
| stencil that could emboss crude braille on thick stock with a
| special stylus. It was his equivalent of a notepad.
|
| Maybe stencils were made for the Port-A-Punch to suit
| different jobs.
| Someone wrote:
| You mean https://www.amazon.com/Lines-Cells-Braille-
| Writing-Stylus/dp... or https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bra
| ille#/media/File%3ALucy_S....
|
| They are used with regular Braille paper. Apart from being
| thicker and sturdier than 'normal' writing paper, there's
| nothing special about that paper.
|
| The Braille writing tool basically forces you to punch
| Braille dots in the paper at the correct
| positions/distances (interestingly, as you punch the dots
| from the backside of the paper, you have to write a mirror
| image of the text)
|
| The photo in
| https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_Port-A-
| Punch.j... doesn't show anything like that in the tool.
|
| Also, zooming in, I think I see that this doesn't use
| standard punch cards, but ones prepared to make it easier
| to punch out the holes. You can't see it in the photo, but
| I would guess that the bottom of the device has holes
| through which the chaff falls out, possibly with a
| collection box, just as that of a hole punch. So, you push
| a punch, probably slightly smaller than the hole to make,
| on the center of the hole to make, onto the paper, shearing
| of the paper along pre-weakened lines.
| JamesCoyne wrote:
| re the brailers: Those are close, but the one I was shown
| was smaller; truly pocket sized. This was ~20 years ago.
|
| I doubt they are really sold anymore, because a small
| handheld tape recorder is easier for "notes" if you are
| blind.
| awhitby wrote:
| Presumably if the data were to be archived or processed
| multiple times it could simply be duplicated onto regular
| punch cards.
| Something1234 wrote:
| Where's the picture of the device?
| cj wrote:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=ibm+port+a+punch
| wolfgang42 wrote:
| There's a pic in the header, but it just seems to be a zoomed-
| in monochrome copy of
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_Port-A-Punch.jpg
| Something1234 wrote:
| Thank you for pointing it out. The picture is so incredibly
| unhelpful as they have it in the article.
| laurent92 wrote:
| And more machines (with keyboards!) that punch into 80-col
| cards, explaining how IBM cards were encoded:
| https://youtu.be/oPKmegMkJrI
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