Punchcards? You want punchcards? I got punchcards. Not exactly what I think you are looking for but a large sample. Please check out www.punchcardarchive.com
Check the Stats page for a quick summary. Beware the Album page. It takes a while to load. After all, it has to display 25532 cards. Not a full program but doing a search on CCROS in the Title field will show a few cards that represent a few bits of a read only S/360 program. Donald -----Original Message----- From: Steve Lewis via cctalk <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, February 28, 2026 11:34 PM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <[email protected]> Cc: Steve Lewis <[email protected]> Subject: [cctalk] Operating system, on punch cards? So studying about 1960s operating systems recently, it occurred to me that the ASR-33 wasn't really "a thing" until the late 1960s. Yes, they technically existed since 1963, but even going through 1960s Datamation issues - you don't see a lot of ads or mention of ASR-33 until 1965. The IBM 1050 maybe existed in 1961 for the IBM 709, but even so - general thought is that CTSS (operating system) was largely initially developed using punch cards. So - are there any archives or collections of these original punch cards? Or are they essentially all gone/destroyed, since in general after some code was "perfected" it was likely then archived to tape? Anyway, apologies - it was just something that only recently occurred to me, that basically all of the original operating systems originated on punch cards: CTSS, Supervisor, AOSP, SCOPE, even MULTICs. So - do any of those decks of cards still exist in archive? Would be neat to see a photo of those - except it would be a shoebox of punch cards like any other, I suppose. Or is this wrong, and the top tier teams making these OS's, probably had teletypes and all the magnetic tape they wanted? -Steve
