IBM punch card

[Yogi]

Hey Y'all,
I ordered the plus pkg. from the museum. They called this morning and said that the only thing they could find was the IBM punch card and they would send it to me for free. What information will I be able to get from the card?

[2R2]

• The IBM punch card "should" tell you the following information:
• Dealer Zone
• Dealer Code (?)
• Car Year
• Car Model
• State car was sold in
• Engine Number
• Serial Number
• Original Owner's name
• Original Owner's place of employment
• Some other information I haven't figured out yet!

[Commander Eddie]

Sometimes those cards have the contents printed on them in plain text, but most of the time you need to run it through a card reader. One card is going to have extremely limited information. A typical production order would require several cards, or more, to capture all the data.
I see Eric responded as well. That is much more than I would expect to be on a single card. That's excellent.

[64studeavanti]

You can lookup the EBCDIC coding system. Each column is a character. That way you can decode the card without a card reader. Unfortunately, that may be of limited use unless you know or can determine the field positions or length.

[Studebaker Wheel]

Actually it depends on which of the two types of IBM cards you receive and that depends on what car you have. I am posting an image below showing the two types (in each case the car is an Avanti in this sample). Obviously the top card is more desirable inasmuch as it has more visible information but that type is not available for all cars. Since they say that the info is limited I suspect the card you will be receiving is the one at bottom. I note in 2R2's first response he states the card would have the engine number, so far as I know that is not the case. Incidentally what year and model car do you have?

[Mrs K Corbin]

Holy Cow Univac!

[64studeavanti]

Nothing odd about UNIVAC. I worked for them around 1975 on the 1108 operating system. I believe they went by the name Sperry at the time. Sometime later, they merged with Burroughs and became UNISYS which I believe still exists.

[Commander Eddie]

While in the Navy in the early 70s I was stationed in Panama at the Navy Communications Station there. We had a brand new IBM card reader and when a message came through, it had a rhythm to it that sounded like a rumba song and would set everyone dancing. One crazy day we even got into a conga line and snaked around the room having a bang up time.

[studegary]

It has been a long time since I have used punch cards. When I was an engineer at IBM in the 1960s, for simple experiments, we put the data on punch cards and had them sorted as appropriate. Of course we were manufacturing large systems (Poughkeepsie, NY) at that time. I was working on ferrite cores at that time, prior to going to East Fishkill, NY to work on semiconductor chips.

[Mrs K Corbin]

Seems like there was a Vax 11/780 when I started college in 1986.

[64studeavanti]

Amazing how many different computers were in use at the time. I started on IBM 1401. Went through 360/370. System 3, 36, 38, as 400. SDS/XDS Sigma 7. DEC 10, 11/70, VAX. HP 3000, UNIVAC 9000 and 1100 series computers, CDC 6600 and 7600 as well as many I have forgotten. Now there are mostly UNIX and Windows Server machines.