The Punch Card Project

This project is mostly under construction (updated: July 2009). There's already a driver for the nixdorf-0377.01 card reader, a pretty small device that can be easily connected to PCs via parallel port.

Some Notes/Planning

Some notes about card processing with computers

Punch cards have 80 columns at 12 bit each. That's a bit unhandy for todays computers, working with 8 bit words. Since there's no standard how to encode 12 bit on 8 bit, i've started to develop a small C++ library to operate with punch cards in memory and on hard disks. There's a fantastical site by Douglas W. Jones about Punch Cards. He has proposed a file format for punch card emulation software. I think it's a bit unhandy, but my library will support this format, among others, for I/O. Since punch card emulators won't work with milions of cards, storage efficiency is not so important, in my opinion, compared to code handiness and maintainability. Therefore the C++ source is very bad in RAM usage, but gives you (as a programmer) a very nice and intuitional interface to your punch card.