Make It with Punched Cards (1971)

In the early 80's I was doing my computing 'A' levels at a technical college. I used to type my programs on one of those old-fashioned teletypes, which I think were a cast-off from a regional polytechnic. I think the computers did have keyboards, but there were only 3 of them, and competition was tight. So I used a teletype. Making a "backup" consisted of printing the program out to paper tape.

I kept the rolls of paper tape and occasionally used them as streamers, much to the curiosity of neighbours.

I wonder if anyone's recovered any interesting data from these, like a digital palimpsest.

My father has a croquet set that my grandfather made, and the signs on the hoops are made from University of Washington computing punchcards from the 60s or 70s, but the whole set is maybe 128 bytes of data, so I've never decoded them.

My favourites were the projects which took advantage of the nature of the medium: bookmark & skyline night light.

You could also make designs, like a xmas tree, on a card by punching out a bunch of holes.

Found an example https://twitter.com/kenshirriff/status/1209886220970426369

When I was a kid somebody made a bunch of Christmas wreaths with punchcards. They were individually twisted in a cone shape and stapled together maybe 3 feet in diameter. And sprayed green. Kinda abstract which was a 70s style.

I half expected a card game made out of punched cards. Which would be a cool idea, now that I think of it.