Yes, at one time I could read a certain amount of the punches. I
knew others that could read punch cards and find bad source and
fix it. I never got that good.
There was an Interpreter that was a big box that you could feed
cards to and it would print across the top, about 50 of the 80
column's data, because the character size was too large to do it
all. I have forgotten the model number of that thing (it was an
IBM box in the service bureau I worked in). And if I remember
correctly it also had a plug board so one could handle specialty
punched cards.....
And then there was the verifier/printer, which was very similar
to a keypunch machine that would read cards and print the
characters above the columns so you could get all 80 done.
Then while I was in a Univac using agency, they had their own
versions of those machines. And they did just a bit more than 80
columns.
Regards,
Steve Thompson
On 11/8/2023 1:46 PM, Phil Smith III wrote:
Stuart Holland wrote, in part:
Also, the cards only had the punches - no text across the top.
That was called "interpreting" cards, IIRC. I forget whether there was a
machine to do this (not that a site with no more punches or readers would have had one!),
but I bet others here will remember.
ObJoke: What, you didn't remember how to just glance at the cards and read the
punches? (I'm 100% sure that back in the day there were folks who could!)
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