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1950ies vintage IBM punchcard machine FS in Switzerland

That's an impressive big piece of iron!

Someone was looking for an IBM punch weren't they?...

Dave
 
Its probably much older than 1950. That model dates from 1930. The 026 was introduced in 1949, so yes before the first IBM computer. Punched cards were widely used in the 1930's and 1940's
 
g4ugm said:
Its probably much older than 1950. That model dates from 1930.
Click to expand...

The punchcard inside the machine relates to the Swiss State pension AHV. ( which is only a part of a full pension)
The 11 characters of the AHV number indicate that this machine was in use in 1964, as that is when the AHV system went from an 8-digit to an 11-digit AHV number.
 
jdreesen said:
The punchcard inside the machine relates to the Swiss State pension AHV. ( which is only a part of a full pension)
The 11 characters of the AHV number indicate that this machine was in use in 1964, as that is when the AHV system went from an 8-digit to an 11-digit AHV number.
Click to expand...

It had a long life then. IBM was still maintaining card equipment until the 1970's. When I started work in the mid 1970's we still had sorters, collators, tabulators and reproducers

see the bottom of

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/keypunch.html
 
yes I was looking for one....

but this is a little too old for my preferences and it is probably going to be chock full of things I don't want to play with for my own health
 
As an aside, keep in mind that IBM made keypunches for non-IBM vendors. For example, at CDC, we used 029s that used the CDC Display Code character set; pretty much the same punch codes as IBM BCDIC, but with a few extra characters thrown in. One of the joys of using an 026 with an IBM EBCDIC machine was remembering the multipunch codes for EBCDIC special characters. And of course, the unit record gear of the time, such as the 407 accounting machine or the 557 interpreter all spoke reduced-character set versions of BCDIC.
 
During the late '50s, the IBM punch card phenomena was present everywhere in the the US Navy's shore establishments. My first stop out of boot camp was the Naval Auxiliary Air Station Kingsville, Texas. I was assigned to the Supply Department and as an Airman Apprentice (E-2), and did everything from swinging a sickle on the grass cutting detail out on fuel farm, where the the JP4 jet fuel was stored (no motors allowed), to driving a 2 1/2 ton Chevy truck every 4th duty night to the main supply depot 50 miles north to NAS Corpus Christi, known as "mainside".

Our Supply Department was in the process of transitioning from a hand posted Kardex file system to IBM punch cards. What was important to the department's civil service employees, was that the average office clerk who worked on posting Kardex files was usually a GS-3. There was great competition for the IBM key punch positions as they would be GS-4. It should be noted that the senior civil service executive for the department was a GS-7. Soon there were IBM cards on all aircraft parts and even our paychecks were on IBM cards.

IBM punch cards were boxed and hand delivered to the main supply facility in NAS Corpus Christi on daily basis, where they were run through a sorting machine and generated massive amounts of green bar paper stock listings. When I retired from the service in 1977, punch cards were still very much evident.
 
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