Notebooks made from punchcards
Ben sends us these Geekbooks, "Neat little pocket notebooks made from vintage computer note cards."
Geek Books (Thanks, Ben!)
Ben sends us these Geekbooks, "Neat little pocket notebooks made from vintage computer note cards."
the latest
latest episodes
Computer note cards? Don't you mean computer punch cards? Pretty geeky though.
I'm pretty sure that that's what they mean when they say "Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate."
Those Etsy sellers have a fantastic store! I got 2 gifts for people that I needed. Thanks for sharing this!
I still have nightmares of walking down the quad freshman year with a stack of those thinking, 'I hope I don't drop these and get them out of order.'
One semester later that were gone. Replaced with early PC's.
Actually on the cover is from Hollerith cards. The inside pages are green bar, and the closure is the button-and-string type of the sort used in inter-office envelopes.
Ah, I remember in the 1970's my aunt bringing home punch cards and she would make them into xmas wreaths, slightly curving individual cards into fitting them into a spiral wreath and then spray painti the whole thing with shiny gold paint.
I'd would kill for one of those now to hang up at the holidays!
@6 - whoa! did she not see the warning clear as day? do not fold, spindle or mutilate!
You can still buy both cards and punches; for example, http://www.cardamation.com/
dr (posting anonymously because I've not been able to post under my own name in weeks; in particular, I'm not trying to hide a connection with cardamation)
Was your account suspended? Send me your info if you want me to investigate.
I have the cards to do this, I unfortunately have no greenbar paper to stuff them with.
I'm almost down to my last box of them. That's only taken 30 years to do. And I'm pretty sure that two or three boxes got tossed during my last move.
I almost forgot about my punched cards that are packed away somewhere, in my closet I think...
As a kid we used to play with boxes of these cards and the green bar printer paper. As they were retiring the old "junk" my father and mother would bring them home for us to play with. If only I had really known what to do with the tty keyboard printer and modem. Unfortunately I was never allowed to jack into the phone system, and I got my fix with our trs80 instead. Even now I think it would be fun to hack together this system for ssh sessions but unfortunately I took them all apart after I got bored with them to see what was inside.
Antinous, I have no problem signing into BB, but every time I've tried to post while logged into BB over the last couple of weeks I've just received an error message. (Despite which I persevered, continuing to type a nimiety of messages nobody would ever see, just like those 10,000-card programs in PL/I from my misspent youth...) However, if you see this it means that the system must be letting me post again, at least this message. (If you've done something to make this possible, then many thanks.)
DR, copy and paste everything before you hit 'submit'. Not as a fix, but to save your frustration in case it happens again. it's a habit I got into in a similar situation.
Thanks for the suggestion; on the other hand, I do think that the harder it is to post something, the less likely one will post rubbish. Discarding what I'd written might have been a favor for everyone.
Apropos of the actual subject at hand, I remember taking a class in some programming topic (possibly data structures) back during the transition from cardpunches to VDTs. The students in my class had the option of using either one for writing their programs. Despite the relative difficulty of using cards (not just the typing, but waiting for the job to be submitted and the printout delivered, mapping the errors on the printout into the card deck, etc.), those of us who used them tended to finish faster, with more concise code. I believe that because of the difficulty we were more likely to search the whole project for errors before every resubmission, instead of just fixing one error then hitting a "compile" button. (Not that I'd want to go back to those days!)
I could write all day about punch cards and green bar paper! So many memories! In college, we kept ours in a personal card drawer and mine would get raided often as I was the better programmer of the class. It was a serious pain in the ass to try putting them back in the correct order.
I saved the blank pages that was between banner pages and either create scratch pads for co-workers or take home for my niece to draw on. Neither seem appreciative.
At a later job, I had found boxes of blank punch cards and put them to use by taping them in to bricks of various sizes for uses like adjusting the height of a system console.
Like I said, many memories.
Wow! Memory surge. My dad brought these cards home from his job at IBM all through my childhood. We used them for scratch paper and crafts. I still find them in my mom's recipe box, my baby book, and boxes of assorted stuff. Many of my preserved letters to Santa are on punch cards.
This probably explains my penchant for using index cards as scratch paper. They just feel right.
Heheh, I misread that as "Netbooks made from punchcards".