> Yes, I did both cards and punched paper tape as a teenager. > I did them too. Nothing to do with Unicode, but those who would like an introduction to punched cards and early computing (mainly IBM oriented) are welcome to take a look at this:
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/ particularly the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and 60s sections, and follow the many links from each entry. In particular, you can see the basic character set of the IBM 360 (as generated by the IBM 29 Card Punch) here: http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/029.html (scroll down a bit after the photo). And for a fascinating (to some :-) history of the early development of IBM and ASCII character sets, see: Mackenzie, Charles E., Character Sets, History and Development, Addison-Wesley (1980). It might be surprising to learn that there was almost as much discussion, argument, and compromise over the early 64- and 96-character and 8-bit character sets as there is today over the worldwide Universal Character Set. Well, maybe not so surprising since the demand for including characters was so great and the space so small. - Frank
