Optical Mark Cards

• Ballots for party conventions
• UCSD Course Evaluation
• Tuskeegee Institute Exam Card
• Golf handicap computation
• Race-track betting
• Science-fair judging
• University of Arizona rush invitation

• Hewlett Packard Educational BASIC
• Hewlett Packard 9820 Programming
• Digital Equipment Corporation Educational Basic
• A University of Iowa card
• IBM Educational FORTRAN
• Monash University Cobol

• Test pattern for optical readers

Ballots for party conventions

These ballots were issued as part of the credentials packet to a delegate to the 1988 Iowa Democratic Convention. Columns 1-25 of the numeric ballot and 1-40 of the yes-no ballot are printed like an IBM 5081 card and may be punched with a conventional keypunch or high-speed punch. The remaining space on the card is arranged to support voting by "bubbling in" either up to 5 numbers or a yes-no choice using a number-2 soft-lead pencil.

The card reader used to read this ballot must have been able to read a mix of punched and marked positions on the card. Many card readers designed for optical mark-sense reading could read punched cards.

These cards were printed by DD.

UCSD Course Evaluation

During the 7^th week of every quarter, students at the University of Calfornia at San Diego were given Course And Professor Evaluation (or CAPE) cards. The student-run course evaluation system at UCSD began in 1973, publishing the results of the CAPE survey in a book, the CAPE book, that many students used as a guide when selecting their courses.

Course evaluations at many universities used optically scanned forms, whether using punched-card format or using page scanners designed for test administration. The whimical artwork on the free-response flip-side of UCSD's card is unusual. It is also surprising that the card never mentions UCSD.

This card was printed by Globe.

Tuskeegee Institute Exam Card

This two-sided card has space for answers to 126 5-way multiple-choice questions, plus a 4-digit machine-readable student number and space for human-readable name. Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) is a historically black land-grant institution in Alabama. Although a small school, it is big enough to have had custom-printed exam cards.

These cards have timing marks along the bottom edge typical of cards printed to be read on a Chatsworth optical-mark card reader. Tuskegee installed an IBM 1620 computer in late 1961, but since Chatsworth Data Corporation was incorporated in 1969, this card is probably from after that date.

This card was printed by IBM.

This card was given by Fred W. Stone, who taught at Tuskegee.

Golf handicap computation

Computing golf handicaps requires tracking, for each player, their top scores over the past year for each golf course. Each player could, of course, enter their score in the course ledger after each game, leaving the handicap computation to a clerk, but this can be automated. This card supports such automation. A course using this card would give each golfer a card for each game and then run them through a computer periodically (perhaps as infrequently as annually) to compute the handicaps of all the participating golfers.

This card was printed by SDC.

Race-track betting

German Tote, an undertaking of the an association of German horse-racing clubs, used this optical-scan card to allow customers to place bets on horse races. To place a bet, the customer would blacken the designated spots to indicate the race number (Rennen), the nature of the bet (place, show, etc.; Wette, and in the matrix on the right, which horse or horses and the order in which they are finish.

This card was apparently printed by FD.

This card was given by Dr Thomas A. Prufer

Science-fair judging

The International Science and Engineering Fair, founded in 1950 by Science Service Inc. This card must have been used between 1993 when Associated Business Products, acquired Scanning Systems, the card's printer, and 2001, when ABP sold the company to Scantron.

In use, a supply of these cards would be given to each science-fair judge, who would then wander the fair, looking at exhibits and speaking with exhibitors while noting their observations on the card. At the end of the judging period, the cards would all be scanned in order to create a ranking of the exhibits.

This card was printed by Scanning Systems.

University of Arizona rush invitation

When a student registered at the University of Arizona, they were handed a stack of punched cards that included this invitation to participate in or opt out of fraternity and sorority rush events. The card would have been punched with the student's name and ID number, and the student was expected to bubble in a yes-no response before turnin the card in at the panhelenic table in the registration center.

This card was printed by GLOBE.

Hewlett Packard Educational BASIC cards

In the early 1970's, Hewlett Packard was a leader in providing computers to public school systems interested in teaching computer programming. While Hewlett Packard emphasized use of timesharing systems, the provisions they made for batch operation using optical mark readers lowered the price per student to something that many public school systems could afford. The black bars between marking positions provide a clock signal to the card reader, allowing it to find the marking positions.

With conventional punched-cards, you punch your program on the card using a keypunch. Users of mark-sense cards have come up with interesting terminology to describe the analogous act of programming on such cards. One of the more interesting descriptive phrases is "we bubbled in our programs on cards", referring to filling the oval bubbles that are commonly used as marking targets on mark-sense forms. I first heard this usage in 2002 from Dr. Glen B. Cook.

The first card above was printed by IBM.
The second card above was printed by Globe.

Hewlett Packard 9820 Programming

In the late 1960's and early 1970's, Hewlett Packard was a leading maker of programmable desk calculators, competing with Olivetti and Compucorp. The HP9820 calculator offered, as an option, programming on cards using an optical mark reader. The card provided space for the symbolic program, encoded as a sequence of calculator keypresses, just as on today's programmable pocket calculator, and then spaces for the machine readable translations of each program step into a binary pattern of marks.

This card was printed by IBM.

Digital Equipment Corporation Educational Basic

Digital Equipment Corporation sold small timesharing systems that ran on their PDP-8 and PDP-11 minicomputers. One market sector that was very important to them was educational computing. Schools, being pressed for cash, found it difficult to afford either computer terminals for interactive computing or keypunches for batch use. So, DEC came out with optical-mark cards to support BASIC programing. This particular card is for a PDP-11 BASIC implementation, judging by the notation in the left margin. The card was printed by IBM, judging by the notation in the lower right margin.

This card uses a nonstandard encoding, with a 1 out of 34 code for keywords that shares some columns with the statement number, and an alphabetic encoding that is completely incompatible with the IBM's Hollerith code that was the industry standard.

This card was not hand-marked, but rather, was run through a printer that added marks and the notation B03 of B07. This suggests that the card might have been part of a software distribution, perhaps an example program that could be used to demonstrate the system. The text "bubbled in" on this card says:

1   0 DIM A(10,10)

This card was printed by IBM.

A University of Iowa card

The University of Iowa was a pioneer in the development of optical mark reading technology (Professor Lindquist developed the first practical mark-sense reader in order to score the ACT college admissions test he developed), so it is natural that, as tome point, the University of Iowa experimented with using mark-sense technology to substitute for keypunches. The form of this card may well predate optical mark sensing, since IBM's first mark-sense readers used electrographic technology where marks were sensed by their electrical conductivity. Nonetheless, the condition of this card suggests that it was from the late 1960's. By that date, IBM had largely abandoned electrographic mark sensing in favor of optical mark sensing.

These cards were printed by IBM and feature an almost impossible to read self-interpreting legend written beside each marking position. These cards have columns marked for the convenience of Fortran programmers, and unlike the HP cards, there is no clock pattern on the card to help the card reader locate the punch positions. It is quite likely that these cards were intended for use by students in intro computer science courses. The University of Iowa Department of Computer Science was founded in 1965, when such a use would have made sense. A high resolution scan is available.

This card was printed by IBM.

IBM Educational FORTRAN

Keypunches were expensive, so some schools opted to teach FORTRAN using IBM's optical mark-sense cards. These cards were complicated to print, requiring a total of three printing plates. Plate 40904 was used for the color ink on the front, plate 40908 was used for the black ink on the front, and plate 40906 was used for the color ink on the back. The color ink was carefully chosen to be invisible to the infrared sensors in the card reader, while the sensors could read black ink and pencil lead. IBM also printed these cards using blue ink, as demonstrated by this scan sent by someone who used these cards in high school in the early 1970s to program on an IBM 1130.

This card was printed by IBM.

Monash University Cobol

Monash University, in Clayton Australia, used this optical-mark card so that students learning COBOL could use pencils instead of keypunches. The card, designed (and copyrighted) by the New South Wales Institute of Technology, probably dates from September 1978 (a guess based on the numbers 9 78 on the right edge of the card. This copyright is still in force, although the card was entirely obsolete within fifteen years because of the rise of the personal computer.

The card uses an interesting self-interpreting code scheme that is similar in spirit (but not detail) to the IBM educational FORTRAN card. As with that card, positions on the left of the card are reserved for statement names, while the remainder of the card is divided into 16 fields, each of which could be used to "bubble in" one letter, digit or punctuation mark. Individual bubbles are provided for 24 letters or digits. The others are coded with two bubbles, either the bubble above and below the indicated letter (as on IBM's card) or the bubbles to the left and right of the indicated letter.

This card was printed by CRC.

Test pattern for optical readers

When it came time to test an optical-mark readers, there were standard test cards as well as diagnostic software to report on ay unexpected or missing marks. A technician could read a deck of such cards to diagnose problems with a reader such as mis-aligned or blocked photosensors.

This test card only includes perfectly positioned black marks. In my own tests of optical scanning equipment, I have found that it is useful to have a form that tests incompletely marked positions in order to assess the range of sensor thresholds as well a marks that are improperly positioned to test the fine alignment of sensors. This card does not include these more advanced tests.

While this card may have come from HP, all of the cards shown here with timing marks along the bottom edge conform to the same basic rules, which may have originated with Chatsworth.

There is no hint of who printed this card.