Programming with Punched Cards (2005) [pdf]

Memories...only dealt with cards for a couple of years, often just for archival. It was always great fun putting a couple cards of your roommate's deck out of order.

And still have an EOF card as a bookmark in my old COBOL book

Back when they were state-of-the-art, I used all the tools and techniques described in that paper.

I'm still a software engineer. Take my word for it: it's good

Out of order could be fun. But backwards or upside-down was even more fun. (Clip all the corners of the card so it won't be noticed.)

More fun could be had with card patches (used for corrections) and card saws (used for clearing the worse jams -- no, I'm not kidding.)

The best card patches were transparent or conductive tape, because they'd be read differently by optical vs. brush-contact readers, and many shops had both.

The IBM 1443 printer used a "type bar" instead of a chain...

http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/still-image/ibm...

https://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/roger.broughton/museum/iomedia/p...

...on occasion a column hammer would stick (they were operated by electromagnets) and some of the little sets of metal type would pop out of the bar. Note that the woman is holding two bars; one with more type on it than the other. That's because there were two bars: the "13-character" (0-9, +, - and $) and the "43-character" (26 alpha, ten digits and +-=.()$ ) bars, and the 13-character bar printed much faster because it didn't need to move as much to put every character in front of every column hammer.

When a type segment popped out, it could get lost inside the machine, and a supply of replacement type segments were at hand. One night (at a bank) the segment on a 43-char bar that had the numbers on it popped out and was lost. The operator on duty duly replaced it with a spare...which turned out to be from a 13-char bar.

It had all the numerals on it.

In different places.

So all the numbers on the bank's transaction journal and general ledger balances had almost-randomly wrong digits in them sometimes, depending on where in the stroke the bar was and which direction it was moving in for that line on the report.

Good times...

The first programming course I took was when I was in highschool and a friend and I took a Fortran course at the University of Rochester. They had us do our first two assignments on punched cards - then we switched to green-screen terminals. I am thankful for that exposure, and also because now I am the youngest person I've ever met that has programmed with IBM punch cards!

May be it is time for Intel adding punched card extensions to the x86 ISA...