IBM Punched Card Typography
The surprising mechanical store for exchangable fonts of the IBM card punches
Another recap from the days before the blog, this time about IBM card punch equipment. You may already know that some of the card punches featured a built-in printer to represent the data in human readable characters on the very top of a card. But did you also know that the font and character set used for printing were exchangable? Or how these electro-mechanical wonders stored them?
In this mini-series you may not only learn all about the astounding intrinsics (including interactive animations of the decoding mechanism), but, if you’re the lucky owner of such an amazing device, you may even design your own font or character set for your IBM 026, 029 or 129 card punch.