About thirty years ago [H. P. Friedrichs] pulled off a hack that greatly improved the process of programming with punch cards. At the time, his school had just two IBM 029 keypunch machines.

An 029 program drum There were three stations in ... The 029 could do a lot of tricks, including punch a card that would set special options for the machine itself. You’d take the card and ...

Punch cards have been used to control the operation of machinery from the early nineteenth century, when the Frenchman Joseph Marie Jacquard patented an attachment to a loom in which a series of ...