[GreenKeys] Re: Historical documents?

[Douglas W. Jones]

On Wednesday, November 20, 2002, at 10:09 PM, jhaynes@alumni.uark.edu 
wrote:

> He could have said something about the various BCD codes the various
> computer companies used before ASCII and EBCDIC.

I maintain a web site on punched cards,

   http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/cards/

That site includes a page devoted to the various card codes and
it briefly covers the connection between the 12-bit alphanumeric
Hollerith card code and the 6-bit BCD codes used in the computer
industry.  There's also a fairly large colleciton of digitized
images of punched cards from my collection.

One thing the previously cited web page

   http://www.wps.com/texts/codes/index.html

gets wrong is its description of cards.  Alphanumeric data
storage on cards was introduced in 1928, but it didn't get
widespread use until the development of general purpose machinery
to use that format see:

   http://www-1.ibm.com/ibm/history/history/year_1928.html
   http://www-1.ibm.com/ibm/history/history/year_1934.html

				Doug Jones
				jones@cs.uiowa.edu