Institutional Punched Cards

• RWTH Aachen
• American Motors
• Argonne National Laboratory
• University of Arizona
• Australian Atomic Energy Commission
• Bendix Corporation
• University of California at Berkeley
• Technischen Universität Berlin
• Ruhr-Universität Bochum
• Technische Universität Braunschweig
• Universität Bremen
• University of California at Los Angeles
• University of California Radiation Laboratory
• University of Chicago
• City University of New York
• Control Data Corporation
• Electrowärme Sörnewitz
• German Aerospace Center
• General Motors
• Grumman Aircraft Engineering
• Regionales Rechenzentrum Hannover
• The Hardware & Supply Company
• University of Illinois
• University of Iowa
• Johannes Kepler Universität
• Leibniz Rechenzentrum München
• Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
• University of London
• Mainzer Volksbank
• University of Michigan
• Michigan State University
• University of Minnesota
• New South Wales Institute of Technology
• Ohio State University
• Siemens
• Stanford University
• Stone and Webster Engineering
• Universität Stuttgart
• University of Washington
• University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

RWTH Aachen

RWTH stands for Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen or, in English, the Rheinish-Westphalian Technical University. While young by European standards, being founded in 1865, it is Germany's largest technical university.

At first glance, these data cards for the Aachen Rechenzentrum (Computing Center) may look identical except for their colors, but the first two, with 16 5-column fields were printed from different artwork by different printers, while the third card with 20 4-column fields was printed by the same printer as the second card. Close examination shows that the two printers used slightly different fonts; the zeros on the card printed by Hummel is slightly more rectangular, while the zeros on the two other cards are slightly more ellipitcal.

The RWTH Aachen computing center had a variety of other cards made for such things as Algol/FORTRAN code, data, job control, an end-of-file card, and an end-of-record card. The data card above is divided into 8 fields of 10 columns each, with added dashed rules breaking the card into 16 5-column fields, while the Steuerkarte (control card) is broken into 20 4-column fields. Again, the two printers involved have used slightly different fonts for otherwise very similar cards.

Curiously, the text Rechenzentrum RWTH Aachen spans card rows 4 and 5 on most of these cards, but two of the cards, the Steuerkarte and end-of-record card have the text on rows 6 and 7.

AmericanMotors

American Motors resulted from the merger of Nash and Hudson in 1954, and was acquired by Chrysler in 1987. At its peak, it was the 4^th largest car manufacturer in the United States. This 2-sided card carried the data for one car order from the dealer through the assembly process.

The card was printed by ISC.

Argonne National Laboratory

Argonne National Lab, outside Chicago, began in 1942 as part of the Manhattan Project. While it began as a home for nuclear reactor research, its mission quickly broadened to include work in high-energy physics. Computing has always played a key part in work done at Argonne, and today, the lab is a major center of supercomputer research.

The card calls itself a symbolic program card, and the fields indicated are appropriate for IBM's FAP assembly language, as used on the IBM 7090. The fields are marked twice, once where a keypunch would print the content, and below that, where an interpreter would print the content. The card is unusual in having a color stripe right down the center instead of at the top edge. The Argonne Labs notations in the left margin indicate that the design is from 1963, at which time the 7090 was IBM's premier mainframe for scientific applications.

This card was not used for the purpose indicated by the fields printed on the card. Instead, it was used to record data from a physics experiment; it holds 10 6-digit numbers (separated by spaces) and the card has sequence number 145.

The card was printed by IBM.

University of Arizona

The University of Arizona Computer Center ordered general-purpose cards in a wide variety of colors, all printed from the same plate (or at least plates made from the same artwork). The design is derived from the IBM 5081.

These cards were printed by GLOBE.

When a student registered at the University of Arizona, they were handed a stack of punched cards. If the student had a registration encumbrance, that card directed them to the table where they had to pay their unpaid fees or take whatever other action was required. Once they had a permit to register card, they could continue the process. For new students their card packet included an invitation to participate in fraternity or sorority rush events.

All of these cards were printed by GLOBE.

Australian Atomic Energy Commission

This utilitarian card from the Australian Atomic Energy Commission seems designed to save ink, with only a few row numbers printed and the smallest print saying A.A.E.C. in the margin. The solid lines giving field divisions shown across the top of the card are for FORTRAN, while the dotted lines at columns 10 and 16 may relate to an assembly language.

This card was printed by IBM Australia.

Bendix Corporation

Allied acquired Bendix Corporation in 1983, so this card is relatively recent. In fact, the formatted space on the card contains space for 87 characters, plus numerous free-form blanks, so this card is almost certainly not intended for conventional punched-card data processing! It is noteworthy that Bendix Corporation, in the early 1960's, made the G-15 and G-20 computers, relatively low-cost machines that were purchased by many universities and were the first computers many students wrote programs for.

This card was printed by PCS.

Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Founded in 1962 as the first new public university created in Germany after World War II, the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. It has since grown into one of the largest universities in Germany. Except for the translation into German, this is a very typical FORTRAN card.

University of California at Berkeley

The only hint that this card was used by The University of California at Berkeley Library is in the return address on the post-card side of this card. It is not clear if this card was ever intended to be punched, although the right side of the form may have been intended to be punched, for example, with the call number of the book. What is far more obvious is that this card would be mailed, as a postcard, to a person when the book they requested was available.

This card was printed by Globe.

Technischen Universität Berlin

Printing the institutional name across the bottom of the card was uncommon, but the length of the name Recheninstitut der Technischen Universität Berlin (Computing Institute of the TU Berlin), leaves few options. The card layout on this card is unusual, giving no hint of the intended application but several are suggested. First, it was quite common to reserve columns 73 to 80 for sequence numbers, particularly on cards input to the IBM 70x series of machines (701, 704, 7040, etc.). This practice is enshrined in the FORTRAN language, which originated on that series of machines. The division of the rest of the card into one-column sices suggests a column-binary format, but the printing of row numbers in columns 1, 6 and 13-15 suggests that perhaps columns 2-5, 7-12 and 16-72 formed three fields, typical of many assembly languages. It is reasonable to guess that the layout of this card was intended to broadly support a variety of appllications.

This card was printed by Hummel.

Technische Universität Braunschweig

The Technische Universität Braunschweig is the oldest institute of technology in Germany, founded in 1745. This punched card from the university's computer center (rechenzentrum) indicates that it is designed for FORTRAN on the lower right. The printing on the card does set off column 6, used for continuation cards in FORTRAN, and columns 73 to 80, ignored in FORTRAN. The card also sets off columns 13 to 15, possibly for assembly language.

The keypunch that was used to punch this card was poorly adjusted. The dot-matrix text should not be printed 1/2 column space to the left of the punched data. Note that the text does not appear to be FORTRAN.

This card was printed by Hummel.

Universität Bremen

This relatively pedestrian card from the Universität Bremen Rechenzentrum (University of Bremen Computer Center) is an end-card, intended to mark the end of a job at the opposite end of the deck from the job card. The University of Bremen was founded in 1971, with a focus on the sciences, so this card can be no older than that.

This card was printed by Hummel.

University of California at Los Angeles

This UCLA Computing and Information Systems punched card uses a nicely selected fine-line grey screen to print the University's initials and the department name. The row numbers show through the grey in the big block letters, but the row numbers have been cleared out from the area occupied by the department name.

This card was printed by GLOBE. The design is derived from the IBM 5081.

Sometimes, a deck of cards submitted at the computer center required special handling. In such cases, a cover card was added to the front of the deck, containing information addressed to the machine operators. This cover card from the UCLA Campus Computing Network contains blanks where the user can indicate what tapes must be mounted before running the job and what to do with them after the job is done. The cover card is slightly larger than a standard punched card, so it must be removed from the card deck because it cannot be run through a card reader.

Before there was a computer science department at UCLA, there was a computer club that offered free (but off-transcript) FORTRAN classes in the early 1960s, and remained influential through the 1970s. Custom printing on punched cards was cheap enough that the club had its own cards printed and sold them to members in a wide range of colors but all printed with the same plate number.

The whimsical artwork on the card featured the club's mascot, a moose, emerging from a log, with a stack of fanfold printout in the lower left and eating tape from a reel on in the lower right. The log is there because all of a user's resource usage is logged by the computer; before real operating systems, computers typically had a handwritten log book in which machine usage was logged. At UCLA, the Office of Academic Computing billed for computer use in Machine Unit Seconds, written MU$, extracting this billing information from the log. MU$ was usually pronounced "moose."

These cards were all printed by IBM.

Thanks to William Putnam, Charles Kline, Dick Johnson and Daniel Gutierrez, all of whom posted helpful comments on the Smithsonian web site for their example of this card.

University of California Radiation Laboratory

The University of California Radiation Lab dates to 1931, and became an official department of the University of California at Berkeley in 1936. The cyclotron was developed there, and during World War II, the lab participated in the Manhattan Project, developing the Calutron for separating uranium isotopes. The RadLab, as it was known, was renamed the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in 1958, and eventually, the Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore labs became independent institutions.

This card is printed with column divisions that support its use for both programs and data:

• The lines around column 7 are set up for assembly language, with a 6-character label field, similar to the IBM 709x card printed by the University of Chicago.
• The shading in columns 1 and 37 indicates the sign bits of two 36-bit row-binary words, and the division of each word into 18-bit halfwords, with the leftmost 3 bits of each word set aside helps readers interpret machine-language programs on the IBM 701 or 704 computer.

The Livermore branch of the RadLab got an IBM 701 computer in 1954 and a 704 in 1956. The Symbolic Assebly Program for the 704 was distributed in 1956, so the formatting for assembly lanugage suggests that the card was designed after 1956. The design presumably predates the renaming of the RadLab in 1958.

The card was used as a FORTRAN card, as indicated by the C punched in column 1, making it a blank comment card. The C at the top of column 1 was printed by running the card through an interpreter, which is why it is a bit wider than 1/80 of the card width.

This card was printed by IBM.

University of Chicago

While the University of Chicago computation center printed the university's coat of arms on some cards, it did not do so on this card. The field divisions at the top of the card suggest FORTRAN, with lighter divisions typical of assembly language, while the division of the body of the card into 3-column blocks (up to column 72) seems very arbitrary.

This card has one subtle feature: Instead of row numbers, columns 73-75 include letters positioned to make this card a self-interpreting card for those with a general understanding of the Hollerith card code.

This card was printed by ISC.

City University of New York

The City University of New York Computer Center used sufficiently bold lettering that printing the name using a halftone screen under the row and column numbers still communicated the institutional identity very well. This card could almost be classified as a card with an institutional logo, but really, all it is text, albeit probably produced under fairly rigid and well thought out institutional graphics design standards.

This card was printed by Advanced.

Control Data Corporation

This card clearly states its corporate origins without any unnecessary artwork. Control Data Corporation, the last vestige of which was merged into a division of British Telcom in 1999, was one of the first companies to go to market with a transistorized computer (it shares this honor with Digital Equipment Corporation) and, with the CDC 6600, it built the fastest computers on earth through the late 1960's. This example holds the letter C in column 1, suggesting it was a FORTRAN comment card.

The design of this card is derived from the IBM 5081.

Electrowärme Sörnewitz

Siemens-Elektrowärme GmbH (Siemens Electric Heater Company) took over a plant in Sörnewitz in 1922 and converted it from making soap and chocolate packaging equipment to electric heaters. During World War II, the plant used slave labor to produce military equipment. Post World War II, under the East German government, the company was renamed VEB Elektrowärme Sörnewitz. EWS, as it was known, expanded its product range to a variety of home appliances and also telephone switchboard frames. The company did not survive the end of Communism.

This card was printed by Reichenbach.

German Aerospace Center

Between 1969 and 1989, the Deutch Forschungs-und Versuchsanftalr für Luft-und Raumfahrt (literally, the German Research and Test Institute for Aviation and Space Flight) was the premier German center for aerospace research. This card was printed for their Rechenzentrum Oberpfaffenhofen (Oberpfaffenhofen computer center), and is formatted for FORTRAN code. The design of this card is loosely based on the IBM 888157.

This card was printed by Hummel.

General Motors

General Motors, founded in 1908 as a holding company to buy the Buick Motor Company and Olds Motor Works. In 1918, GM bought United Motors, which owned Delco, originally Dayton Engineering Laboratories Co. Delco began making car radios in 1936 and was renamed Delco Electronics at some point after that. In 1985, while GM retained the Delco trademark, Delco Electronics was merged with Hughes Aircraft to create Hughes Electronics.

This labor distribution card is a fairly typical accounting form.

This card was printed by Pryor.

Grumman Aircraft Engineering

Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corportion was from 1929 to 1969, a major aircraft supplier and defense contractor. The company changed its name to Grumman Aerospace in 1969 and later merged with Northrop. Like any large mid-20th century company, the job of payroll accounting was too big to do by hand, so it was automated using punched cards.

This card is formatted to be punched using Remington Rand's 90 column encoding. That means the card is arranged as 2 rows of 45 columns, using 6 punch positions to encode each character. Punches were round, but a blank card like this one could easily be punched using IBM's 80-column format.

This card was printed by Remington Rand.

Regionales Rechenzentrum Hannover

The Regionales Rechenzentrum Hannover (Hannover Regional Computer Center) had these cards printed, nominally for programs. The bold column-divider lines setting off column 6 and after column 72 specifically support FORTRAN code.

The card was printed by Hummel.

The Hardware & Supply Company

The Hardware & Supply Company of Akron, Ohio, had been in existence for half a century before this accounts payable card was printed. The company name is in the right margin of the card. It is a fair guess that the company was using a wide variety of punched cards to automate its accounting department, and that it had done so for years before this card was printed, but this is the only example here.

The card was printed by Hackett.

University of Illinois

This card, printed for the University of Illinois Department of Computer Science in the late 1960's, does a utilitarian job of displaying institutional pride. Given the age and size of this department, the home of ILLIAC I and II, and the birthplace of ORDVAC and ILLIAC IV, it is surprising that they didn't come up with something more interesting!

The used example, on gold stock, has data is arranged in 8 fields of 10 columns each, in fixed-point decimal format with one place before the point and leading zeros suppressed. The division of the data into fields bears no relationship to printed face of the card. The data was punched on a keypunch with printing turned on.

This card was printed by IBM.

Thanks to Matthew Placella for the used card.

University of Iowa

The University of Iowa, in Iowa City, is best known for its writing program and medical school, but it also has one of the 10 oldest computer science departments in the country. These very utilitarian cards do nothing to promote the institution. All have the same plate number.

The design of these cards is based on the DSI 327.

The psychology department at Iowa has a long and distinguished history of experimental studies. The ethics working with human subjects require that the subject give informed consent before being experimented on, and psychology experiments require many subjects. In psychology, it is common to recruit experimental subjects from among psychology students. This card is designed to track student participation as well as retaining a record of each student subject's informed consent. The card is intended to be read on a card reader that can sense pencil marks as well as punches, so the student and experimenter can enter information on the card with a pencil.

JohannesKepler Universität

The Johannes Kepler Universität in Linz, Austria was established in 1966 and became a university in 1975. These cards were produced for their Elektronische Datenverarbeitung Zentrum (EDV Zentrum or electronic data processing center).

These cards were all printed by IBM Austria, and all appear to have been printed from the same priting plate, as evidenced by the slight damage to the plate at the top of column 38 and the bottom of column 33.

Leibniz Rechenzentrum München

The Leibniz Rechenzentrum (computer center) in Munich was founded in 1962 as a a branch of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. It is known today as the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre. The card with a pink stripe has a format derived from the IBM 5081 and the plate number 158 016 is a lightly obscured 5081. The plain cards have a different plate number and some gratuitous changes, with the top row of column numbers in different places and labels in column 1 identifying rows 11 and 12.

Two of these cards were printed by IBM Deutschland.

The plain card at the lower left was prited by Hummel from its own artwork, with slightly different fonts from those IBM used.

The Hummel card was given by Dr Thomas A. Prufer

This card, printed brilliant white card stock, would stand out in any deck of cards, and without a cut corner, it would be easy to identify even when stacked with other cards. What does BKZ stand for?

This card was printed by IBM Deutschland.

The Leibniz Rechenzentrum had a TR 4 mainframe, where TR stands for Telefunken Rechner. The TR 4 was introcuced in the early 1960s.

The Abschnittskarte or section card has boxes on it for hand-written notations. The Plotter and Gerber boxes were presumably to be marked if the job required use of a plotter or a gerber device. Presumably, these were different, but Joseph Gerber's first products were plotters, from which he developed a variety of numerically-controlled machine tools. The labels BEN and FKZ also look like invitations to write on the card. All of this suggests that the Abschnittskarte was similar in function to a job card.

Steuerkarte means control card. Presumably these were used for job control functions within a deck of cards.

These cards are from the 1970s, when the Leibniz Rechenzentrum used a TR 440 mainframe. Unlike the earlier Abschnittskarte, this one does not have any invitations for handwritten content. Presumably, the TR&bsp;440 control language was more complete that that of the TR 4 and required less human intervention. Steuerkarte means control card.

These cards were printed by IBM Deutschland.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

These cards from the computer museum at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are almost identical, but printed from different plates, as evidenced by the numbering in the right margin and a slight difference in the orientation of the octopus. Lawrence Livermore Labs is famous for its role in nuclear weapons development, and because of that, it has long had some of the biggest supercomputers in the world. That computing power has led to a vigorous research program in computing, and as something of a spinoff, a museum of computing. The cards were printed as souvenirs for museum visitors, who could punch them on a keypunch at the museum. The white card is unusual, being printed in blue ink. The cards also include a self-interpreting legend in the left margin.

University of London

The University of London dates to 1826, and received an official charter in 1836. The ULCC (University of London Computer Center) was founded in 1968, and began operations at 20 Guilford Street, London, with CDC mainframes providing computing services to all of the University of London's colleges.

This card was printed by IBM United Kingdom.

Mainzer Volksbank

The Mainzer Volksbank (People's bank of Mainz) was founded in 1862. In the 1960s, it merged with several other cooperative banks to become one of the largest cooperative banks in Germany. This Verfallkarte (expiration card) carries information about a Handelswechsel (commercial bill of exchange).

This card was printed by MECO.

University of Michigan

The design of this card is based on the 733727 (a card format produced by several printers). The added blanks for brief handwritten notes on the left are unusual, and their purpose is obscure. These cards were widely used for both programs and data on the University of Michigan campus. The institutional identifier printed across the right edge of the card is minimal.

While the card has a plate number, 830373, it has no indication of who printed the card. This is unusual.

The column binary format of this card is arranged to store 24 words of 36 bits each. This card format was used at the University of Michigan after they got their IBM 704 computer, the vacuum tube ancestor of the 709x series of machines. The hardware interface to the card reader read successive groups of 3 columns on the card into successive 36-bit words in memory, with the sign bit read from row 12 of the first column and the least significant bit from row 9 of the third column. It is noteworthy that, on the 709x family of machines, the top halfword of each 36-bit index register was referred to as the decrement field and could be used as an iteration counter for loop control, while the bottom halfword of the index register was the address field.

The format of a binary read combined with the format of the index register led naturally to the object format documented on the card. The first word of each object record was designed to load into an index register, with the shaded area (the low 15 bits) used as the address of the object block and the low 5 bits of the high half used as the count field.

The usual way of examining registers on this machine was in octal, so the data area on the card is divided int 3-bit fields. Columns 4-6 are the checksum, but one bit of the header word could be punched to force the loader to ignore the checksum -- useful when hand-patching an object deck, since it was far harder to recompute the checksum than to adjust the contents of a word on the card.

It is interesting to note that the data punched on this card has no relationship to the preprinted format on the card; this pattern of card use was quite common in the later 1960's, as users drifted away from applications that made use of the format information on the card and began to use whatever cards they could find.

This card was printed by Hackett.

Michigan State University

This Michigan State University Computer Laboratory card attempts to provide an incredible amount of information on the face of the card! It contains two complete character sets, the CDC Display Code and the ASCII code, plus an assortment of other information, plus hints in columns 1, 2, 79 and 80 about the column binary object code format for the CDC 6500.

This card was printed by Hackett.

University of Minnesota

The design of this card for the University of Minnesota's University Computer Center is very similar to the University of Michigan Tabulating Service card, but without the two blanks for handwritten content and with the University Computer Center name in big but faint grey letters.

This card was printed by DD. The design of this card is based on the 733727 (a card format produced by several printers).

New South Wales Institute of Technology

The New South Wales Institute of Technology Computer Centre, in Sydney, Australia, was created in 1964 from the Sydney Technical College, and it was incorporated into University of Technology, Sydney, in 1988. The utilitarian design of this card is based on a framework similar to that used for the card for the University of Illinois Department of Computer Science card above, but it is unusual, being printed in blue ink instead of the almost universal black.

This card was printed by IBM Australia. The design is derived from the IBM 5081.

Ohio State University

These cards from Ohio State Univeristy were designed to hold programs. The first, with a grey stripe, is a a typical FORTRAN card, while the second, with a green stripe, is designed for Scantran, a language used at Ohio State's Numerical Computation Laboratory in the 1960s. I have seen no evidence of its use elsewhere.

These cards were printed by BSC.

This job card from Ohio State is fairly typical of OS/360 job cards, although it explains the job card format in more detail than is typical and offers a timeless warning about not sharing computer access credentials.

This card was printed by DD.

Siemens

While the Siemens conglomerate has its origins in 1847, there was a major reogranization in 1966. Prior to that, Siemens & Halske, one of the predecessor corporations, had been in the computer business for a decade.

The Siemens System 300 was a small family of industrial process-control computers initially released in the 1960s. These were a spinoff of the Siemens 3000 family that began with the 3003 in 1963.

This card was printed by Hummel.

The Siemens System 4004 was a family of mainframes manufactured by Siemens under license from RCA. The family was introduced in 1965 to compete with the IBM System 360, and was identical to the RCA Spectra 70. This Job card is quite similar to job cards for IBM's OS/360.

This card was printed by Gizeh.

Stanford University

This card was printed by IBM.

Thanks to Mark C. Lawrence at Stanford for his notes on the history of Stanford's computer systems.

Stone and Webster Engineering

Stone and Webster Engineering Corporation, established in 1889 and based Massachusetts, is big enough that it had an IBM 360-family mainframe in the punched-card era. This card has the classic format of an OS-360 job card, although the brown color is unusually somber for a job card.

This card was printed by IBM, and appears to be based on a framework similar to the IBM 507536.

Universität Stuttgart

The Technische Hochschule Stuttgart was founded in 1829 and renamed as the Universität Stuttgart in 1967. It is one of the oldest technical universities in Germany. This card declares itself to be an Algol/FORTRAN card, but the fields on the card are all related to FORTRAN. The Algol language had (and has) no fixed field structure.

The card was printed by Hummel.

University of Washington

These job cards for the University of Washington's Burroughs 6700 computer were used for administrative data processing jobs. In this era, the university computer center would frequently have just one mainframe computer, supporting both academic and administrative computing, but it was (and still is) important to keep the admininistrative and academic data strictly separated. Both cards are printed from the same artwork; the reason for the different colors is unknown. The B6700 computer was introduced in the early 1970s, so these cards must date from that era.

These cards were printed by GLOBE.

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Like the University of Illinois and the New South Wales Institute of Technology, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee's Computing Services Division decided on a standard design with their name in a box centered on the card. Unlike the other two, the background grid of row numberes was not in any way erased or even dimmed behind the box. Instead, the design merely (but quite effectively) works around the background.

This card was printed by OEI. The design of this card is derived from the IBM 5081.

Thanks to Marshall L. Dermer for this card.