Institutional Punched Cards

Part of the Punched Card Collection
by Douglas W. Jones
THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA Department of Computer Science


Click on any image for a high-resolution version. All images were scanned at 600 dpi and edited to remove streaks caused by bad (or dust occluded) pixels in the scanner. Note that, prior to 1978, all material printed in the US without a copyright notice was automatically in the public domain; this also applies to most material printed before 1989 without a notice. Beware, however, that institutional logos are typically protected by trademark law and cannot be used in a manner that conflicts with the trademark owner's rights.

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.

 [RWTH Aachen plain 16-field card]
 [RWTH Aachen pink 16-field card]
 [RWTH Aachen green 20-field card]

At first glance, these cards for the 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.

Argonne National Laboratory

 [Argonne National Lab card]

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

 [University of Arizona Computer Center card]
 [green University of Arizona Computer Center card]  [salmon University of Arizona Computer Center card]
 [gold University of Arizona Computer Center card]  [brown University of Arizona Computer Center card]

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).

These cards were printed by GLOBE. The design is derived from the IBM 5081.

Australian Atomic Energy Commission

 [Australian AEC card]

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

 [Bendix Corporation supply and tool requisition card]

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

 [Ruhr-University Bochum Punched Card]

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.

Technischen Universität Berlin

 [Berlin Technical University Punched Card]

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.

Technische Universität Braunschweig

 [Technical University of Brauschweig punched card]

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.

Universität Bremen

 [University of Bremen punched card]

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.

University of California at Los Angeles

 [University of California at Los Angeles punched card]

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.

 [University of California at Los Angeles cover card]

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.

 [UCLA computer club card]
 [UCLA computer club brown card]  [UCLA computer club gold card]
 [UCLA computer club green card]  [UCLA computer club card printed with green ink]
 [UCLA computer club pink card]  [UCLA computer club salmon card]

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

 [University of California Radiation Lab punched card]

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 card is designed for early IBM card readers that only read 72 columns of data, so the card clearly indicates that columns 73-80 are outside what will be read. The card also incorporates a self-interpreting key in the left margin.

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

 [University of Chicago punched card]

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

 [City University of New York punched card]

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

 [Control Data Corporation punched card]

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.

Grumman Aircraft Engineering

 [Grumman Aircraft Punched Card]

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.

Regionales Rechenzentrum Hannover

 [Hannover punched card]

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.

University of Illinois

 [U. of Illinois Department of Computer Science card]
 [U. of Illinois Dept. of Comp. Sci. card on gold stock]

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

 [U. of Iowa card]
 [U. of Iowa card on blue stock]  [U. of Iowa card on gold stock]
 [U. of Iowa card on pink stock]

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.

 [University of Iowa Psychology Department card]

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.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

 [Lawrence Livermore National Labortory museum gold card]
 [Lawrence Livermore National Labortory museum white card]

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 Michigan

 [U. of Michigan Tabulating Service card]

This card is arranged as 20 fields of 4 columns each, a very generic organization. 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.

 [U. of Michigan column binary card]

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.

Michigan State University

 [Michigan State University card]

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.

University of Minnesota

 [University of Minnesota card]

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.

New South Wales Institute of Technology

 [University of Minnesota card]

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

 [Ohio State University Fortran card (gray stripe)]
 [Ohio State University Fortran card (green stripe)]

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.

 [Ohio State University job card

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.

Stanford University

 [Stanford University job card]

This card appears to be from the 1961-1966 era, when Stanford had a Burroughs B5000 (upgraded in 1965 to a B5500) and an IBM 7090. The prepunched text "$JOB" in columns 1 through 4 allows the card to be dated to before 1967 when Stanford got an IBM System 360/67. This card lacks the interesting artwork, perhaps because it is clearly intended to be the second card in a 2-card sequence.

By the late 1960's, Stanford, MIT and Carnegie Mellon were the three leading centers of computer science research in the country, and all of them were among the pioneers in the shift away from punched cards to interactive on-line computing.

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 Webber job card]

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

 [University of Stuttgart Algol/FORTRAN card]

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.

University of Washington

 [University of Washington green job card]
 [University of Washington orange job card]

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

 [University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee card]

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.

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

Thanks to Marshall L. Dermer for this card.