IBM Hollerith punch card puncher..replete w/bit bucket :)

[Chris2005]

Does anyone know what something like this is worth? Relays, vacuum tubes, ugh, all that stuff. Operational I believe. Any interest?

[alltare]

Is it an electromechanical punch, or is it the "field kit" that consists of a single card holder and manual punch?

[Chris2005]

it ain't no "field kit". It's the size of an office desk. Don't know much more about it. It's not in my possession, not yet anyway.

[Micom 2000]

In The mid-50s I worked as a "junior IBM Operator" for $35 a wk. at a
government Workmens Compensation installation. Basicly there were 3 rooms, the Data entry room. the processing room, where I worked, and the sacrosanct temperature-controlled Data storage room, with a glass viewing wall , where the high priests dressed in sterille garments tended to large tape disks. I never entered that room.

The processing room bunch, who worked on the sorters, compilers, collators and printer-processors, eagerly sought excuses to enter the Data-entry room where around 30 young typists, all female, entered
on IBM cards data from documents. We occasionally munged a card to get a duplicate and talk to a girlfriend or promote a date.

The machines they worked on were possibly what you're talking about.
I've seen the term Holerinth many times, incomprehensibly, but the
machines these typists worked on , were leased (not sold) from IBM.

Don't have a clue as to their value, but it gives me a kick to see what IBM cards go for these days, when many times we would "bend, spindle,
or mutilate" (right term ?) them just to visit a potential girlfriend.

Lawrence

[Terry Yager]

Helluva way to pick up women...

--T

[Micom 2000]

Helluva way to pick up women...

--T

Great line. I'll be giggling over the weeks as I am just now. May I use it
without attributes ? We did what we could in those days. Hee,hee,hee!!!
Sex still rules.

Lawrence

[olddataman]

Is there a label on te machinne anywhere? It shorld be a Model 019 or 029 Key Punch. The 019 was a numeric only punch and the 029 was an alphanumeric punch. Then there was one or two more that had diffeent numbers such as 059 and maybe another. They were Verifyng and duplicating machines. The "Data Entry"process was interesting. One pereson transcribed the data from the customer's raw paper sheets to punched cards. A second operator put the punched cards into another machine called the Verifying Key Punch and essentially re-did the first persons work. As each card passed through the machine and the data was compared as entered by the Verifying operator against the data as entered by the first operaor. If the holes didn't compare the machine hallted and the Verifyer had to decide who was right and correct the error on a new card and swap the bad one out of the deck.
The keyboards were kind of interesting. All I could figure out was that IBM did not want to have to hire only people that could "touch-type" on a standard typewriter so the keypunch keyboards were totally different. They did not have a "shift" key. They did not have the ability to punch lower case letters. They could punch UC leterss, numbers and a standardized set of business oriented symbols. Thus, they had two keys labled "Letters" and "Figures" and the operators were trained to use this type of keyboard. Note that this limited set of Alpha and Numerics and Symbols" convention was carried over to the High Speed Line Printers of the day too. They usually had a maximum of 48 Characters and symbols that they could print. This would be 26 UC alphas, ten numerics and twelve symbols like @, $, +, -, =, and six more plus a blank for the "Space" function.
If you think about it a little you will realize whyI think that the machine you are about to acquire is almost surely worth a fair amount and getting more valuable all the time. The fact is I can hardly believe that so many of you don't know anything about those mchines because it seems such a short time ago that the "Key Punch " or "Data Entry" operator was a major career for so many women in this country, and the "Service Bureau" was more or less a standard business in any town bigger than 25,000 in the country. The Service Bureau wss where the cards were processed for every business or goverenmental agency or department that didn't want or couldn/t afford their own.
You will also get an idea why IBM did not equip any of their computers before the PC with floppy disks. (Yes, I know that IBM inventedthe floppy disk, butit was a "read-only" device, first used to let the Customer Engineer load hardware disgnostic rotines into the 360-20 in 1972or 73. It was Century Data Systems and Memorexthat first made "Read/Write floppy drives.) They sold billions of blank cards each year and they did not sell their equipment, they leased it. If the keypunches and the sorters, verifiers, colaters and everything else were replaced they would loose a ton of money per month.

ONE MORE THING: STEVE, I HAVE ONE OF THOSE MACHINES YOU DESCRIBE. IT IS ESSENTIALLY BRAND NEW, WITH SAMPLE CARDS AND EVERYHING ELSE, STILL IN IT'S CARRYING CASE AND WITH INSTRUCTION MANUAL.
Ray

[alltare]

Ray,

I have the hand-held frame assembly that holds a holerith card in proper alignment while you manually punch it. Unfortunately, that little rectangular punch has grown feet and left home.

I used to have a manual 8-bit paper tape punch, too. I actually used it quite a bit long ago to delete mispunched code (all holes = null), or to sometimes correct the code. Very tedious.




... ONE MORE THING: STEVE, I HAVE ONE OF THOSE MACHINES YOU DESCRIBE. IT IS ESSENTIALLY BRAND NEW, WITH SAMPLE CARDS AND EVERYHING ELSE, STILL IN IT'S CARRYING CASE AND WITH INSTRUCTION MANUAL.
Ray

[gcarrick]

When you submitted a job to the keypunch staff you could ask for verification or not. Verifying cost extra since the manual part of the job was the biggest part of the cost. The verifier would cut a small notch in the right end of the card as an indication that it had been verified. Once upon a time I submitted a job and asked for verifying. The deck I got back had obviously not been verified since some of the cards were only partly punched when the original operator realized she had made an error, ejected the bad card and duplicated it up to the point of the error, then finished it right. The verify operation stopped if the key pressed did not match the card. But the cards had the verify notch in the right end. So I went down to the keypunch room to see what had happened. (It was in the basement, along with the computer.) When I walked in I saw a verifyer set up with a blank drum card (which controlled the operation) feeding cards through. This was cutting "verify" notches in the blank cards. The operators would then punch the job on these cards and charge for the verify operation.

[olddataman]

Hi, and thank you for the more acccurate info. To tell you the truth, I have spent 50 years in the computer business doing everything you can imagine EXCEPT that I have actually punched maybe 25 or so cards total in my life nd NEVER been inside a job shop, batch procesing site or any other type of installation like those we are talking about. So, my knowledge is based solely on the fact that when you aare involved on a daily basis with a need to know somehing about all aspects of the business of turning raw data into intellegile tables and reprts, so you sort of learn these things,
Incidentally, one of my best friends started out as an IBM 650 Operatoar-Trainee, in 1958. He worked his way up to Lead Operator in a large IBM 7094 shop and just prior to the replacement of the 7094 he was stolen away to bcome the Operator and Caretaker of a large real-time, time shared data acqusition and control system. Since all of the software for it was written in-house, his programming talent began to surface. A few years later he got a job as a programmer for Pitney/Bows Alpex Corp. and was one of the earliest programmers of the INTEL 4004 microprocessors. That company went down the tubes because the world as not yet ready for Point of Sale Terminals, and after several years orking as a programmer for a couple of the (then) new computer typesetting system he needed to settle down for the sake of his faamily, and got a job as a programmer for the Army Finance Center at Ft. Harrison in Inddianapolis, and before he retired he worked his way up to the point where he was one of six people in the world who could make changes in the code of the Army's software used for payroll and accounting. Not bad for a skinny, nervous kid who never went to college!
The point of all that hipe fo my friend is that he is an authority on "Tab-Cards, the equipment and every trick in the book associated with them that I know. He recently gave me the manuals from everything from the 650 to the 360s/85. all of the SDS/XDS computers, the RCA Spectra series and even my old friend the LGP-30
Well, thanks again for the info and I hope I avent bored ou with my ramblings.
Ray

[Chris2005]

for whatever reason I'm not get notifications of postings to this thread. My apologies for not responding sooner or often enough. This is basically the unit I was talking about:
http://www.vintage.org/gallery.php?grouptag=IBM026
Is this worth anything to a collector?

[olddataman]

The way I look at is this: It is of interest to visitors to the VCF. People like you and a great many more find it interesting and are curious to know more about how things were done n those days. IBM punched cards are one of the more secure methods of presorving data even at this late date if they are kept in a good envronment, but there is not much equipment left with which to translte the data to a medium today's computers can handle.
To me, this adds up to VALUE and more as time goes by. If I had a place to keep them I would buy all I could get my hands on, of every type of card processing equipment.
Ask Salem at VCF.org what he thinks,and Erik too.
Ray

[bobar]

I bid on one at an auction last year and it sold for a little over $500. ( I bid the $500!).

Bob

[rustymice]

I have one these machines and am still using for microfilm aperture card identification. I am looking for another one either an IBM 029 or 129. I need it for parts.
Rich

[Terry Yager]

Perhaps you should post in the 'Wanted' section of the board. Chris2005 has not been active here for over three years.

--T