Day 6- How to Read a Punch Card

Reading a punch card is not as difficult as you may think once you have the steps down. First, you will need to have a format key to know what punches make what letter. You will be comparing the key to the punch card you are trying to read. The picture I used was: http://www.diycalculator.com/imgs/paper-05.gif

Basically, every column that has a punch or punches is a single letter, number, or symbol. For example, if I saw that the top row and the 4 were punched out in one column, I would use my key to see that this is the letter D. Go from left to right, decifering each column one by one. This is basically a matching game- comparing the key with your card to match up the punches and see what the card reads. There are different forms of punch cards, though, so you must make sure your key and punch card are the same format and have the same number of columns. A good site to read more about this is:http://www.scribd.com/doc/6915598/IBM-Punch-Cards . This site also has a good key to compare your card to.
Reading a punch card may take some time, but it is not as hard as you may think it is at first glance. Just look at each column that has a punch separately, and use a key to see what those punches mean.